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February 21, 2011

MANY PEOPLE HAVE EXPERIENCED THE FEELING OF being led toward a decision by something larger than themselves. But what do you do with that feeling? Sometimes the practical tools for decision-making, like writing down lists of pros and cons, fall short. In his book Sacred Compass (Paraclete Press, Brewster, MA, 2008; also available on Kindle and with a study guide for groups), the Quaker author J. Brent Bill has created a spiritual tool kit for the spiritual practice of discernment.

Drawing on his own circuitous spiritual, personal, and professional journey, as well as historic sources, and friends' and mentors' experiences, Sacred Compass is smart, wise, and disarmingly accessible. The book doesn’t promise easy solutions. Life brings challenges. Sometimes we get confused. Instead of turning away from those moments, Bill encourages us to work through our problems, developing the tools of discernment. I interviewed Brent a few years ago when the book first came out, then put it aside. Recently, searching for help in discernment, I came back to our conversation, and, with Brent’s permission, reproduce it now.

QUESTION: As someone whose life has followed a winding path, I found your description in Sacred Compass of the journey your life has taken, with “15 jobs, 16 homes, and too many cars,” to be refreshingly honest, funny in an I-can-so-relate way, and really different from what I often read in self-help books.

J. BRENT BILL: I’m not a spiritually perfect person. I do my best to make my way through this life and be true to my understanding of faith and what it calls me to do and be. I don’t get it right a lot of the time. So an expert voice doesn’t help me much.

If people have all the answers, I tend to distrust them. When I read those kinds of books, I just note my inadequacies all the more. As a reader, I look for fellow companions, people who are spiritually wise and a couple steps further down the road and willing to share their experiences.

Q: Have you had people in your life who are “a couple steps further down the road”?

A: In my writing life, I certainly have. Anne Lamott comes to mind. Kathleen Norris is another; her writing is so beautiful. The Quaker Scott Russell Sanders is another. I’ve been fortunate to have folks who are that way in my personal life. My wife, Nancy, is one. Our views are fairly disparate most of the time, but she’s one of the most spiritually sensitive people I know. There are other folks as well.

Their honesty, for me, is what sets them apart. I never feel like I’m with a professor who’s studied it, and I’m sitting at their feet. Instead, it’s “here’s how I’ve gotten this far.” That speaks to my condition.

Q: Let’s go back to all those jobs and houses and cars. Did you see spiritual direction at work in this circuitous path, or did that come later?

A: I would say both. I don’t feel that I ever took a job that I shouldn’t have. But there were times that I wondered why I did something I did, like being photocopier salesman.

Q: Tell me more about that job.

A: I’m not a salesperson. But that job came at a really important time in my life. I had gone through a divorce. I knew I wasn’t in any place to take care of anybody. I needed being taken care of. A friend of mine owned a copier company. He said, “Why don’t you come do this? You may not like it. But you can do it and it will put food on the table.” And it did.

Q: It must have felt strange to move into the workaday world after being a pastor.

A: A lot of my mindset was on just surviving the day. I was living in a new city, and trying to make friends. I realized I didn’t want to spend my life in commerce. I wasn’t going to stay with the company for 20 years and retire a district sales manager. That wasn’t going to be my thing.

But what would be my thing? I realized there’s a whole lot wider world out there. After having been a pastor and denominational staff person, I was so wrapped up in the Quaker world. Everything that seemed so important, that we fussed about at Yearly Meeting, really was not all that crucial.

Q: I love William Penn’s line about true love sending us out into the world. Problem is, when we go into the world, we have to deal with all the frustrations of that world.

A: On some levels, I think it’s easier to see spirituality at work in the business world. You’re examining significant questions. You deal with ethics. You deal with politics. “What would I say to make a sale? What would I do to meet my quota?” “Where is God in this person who’s just really giving me hell right now?”

"On some levels, I think it’s easier to see spirituality at work in the business world. You deal with ethics. 'What would I say to make a sale?' 'Where is God in this person who’s just really giving me hell right now?'"

My experience really forced me to seek that of God in everyone. What are their needs? I couldn’t look at a person as just a number or a customer. I tried to remember who I had bought things from. It was usually people who I felt I had some kind of human connection with, who looked me in the eye, or who I'd been out to lunch with. I also learned from the experience of being a copier salesperson that I was extremely introverted. I was not meant to be in such an extroverted profession.

Q: How did you resolve that? Did you try to become a bit more extroverted, or practice acceptance and find work that was more reflective of you?

A: The latter. I felt like this is obviously not who I was. I have friends who are super successful at selling. It’s who they are. I couldn’t do it. My next position, as a United Way executive, felt much more like ministry to me.

Q: Have you always had a sense of spiritual connectedness in your life, or did you cultivate it?

A: I think it was a combination. I grew up in a fairly religious family.

Q: What did your dad do?

A: He was a factory worker and independent electrician for most of my life. I grew up going to Friends Church in Ohio. We went to Sunday school, church, and Sunday evening service. Sometimes we went to a midweek service. My folks were always hospitable so when traveling ministers or evangelists or anybody was passing through they always seemed to stay at our house. I met ex-convicts who had gotten saved and were doing a ministry tour. A couple years later [Quaker theologian] T. Canby Jones of Wilmington College stayed at our house.

Q: How did those experiences affect you?

A: I felt pretty convinced by the time I was 12 that I was supposed to do what we called “full-time Christian service.” I did not have a Road-to-Damascus-type revelation. I’m a Midwesterner; we don’t have those kinds of experiences. God works on us long enough that we say, “All right, OK, that’s what I should do.” Frankly, a Damascus Road experience would scare the crap out of me. I need slow, steady revelation. I think God works with our teachability. God works with us where we are.

"I think God works with our teachability. God works with us where we are."

I was in some ways the kid least likely to become a minister out of our youth group.

Q: How so?

A: Even at a young age, I was a smart-ass. You don’t think of those kids as the ones who go on into service. Usually it’s the really good, pure kid who knows his Bible really well and prays in that wonderful, stained glass voice, or the reprobate who everybody writes off, then gets saved. Instead it was one of the normal kids in youth group who was a smart mouth. When we chose life verses – the verse to pattern our life after – other people would choose John 3:16 or the 23rd Psalm. I’d pick obscure references like 1 Chronicles 26:18 from the Old Testament, “two west at Parbar and three at the gate.”

Q: What does that mean?

A: It doesn’t mean anything. It was just so weird. I always had a questioning mind, asking, “Why is that in the Bible?” But I think God can work with anyone.

Q: That sense of examining things in different ways comes through in your writing.

A: I’ve known folks who have crises of faith: “Is there a God? How much is true?” I’ve never had that experience. God has always been a given for me. The questioning part, for me, is to say, “Let’s kick the tires on this thing and check it out.” If all truth is God’s truth, it’s got nothing to fear from my puny brain kicking it around asking questions.

"If all truth is God’s truth, it’s got nothing to fear from my puny brain kicking it around asking questions."

Q: That’s a good segue to talk about the book. Why did you write Sacred Compass?

A: A statement kept coming back to me from the old London Faith & Practice [the book of faith and practice of the London Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends] about “the art of living.” It connected with me. Living really is a kind of art.

Quakers talk about decision-making through “leadings” – “as way opens.” I started talking with other people about the topic, and they said they’d like to read something that doesn’t tell you what to do, but how to do things.

Q: How do problems of discernment come up?

A: A lot of times it happens in crisis. It can be a professional opportunity: “I’ve got a job offer. Should take it?” Or a decision about where to go to school. Or getting news about an illness. “Where is God in this? How could this be part of my path?” Sometimes, when people ask these questions, the answers that others give them are platitudes. “God wanted it that way.” “Your son got killed because God wanted another angel.” Well, that's not helpful. It often just wounds people. I wanted to say, “It’s ok to wrestle with these questions. Let’s explore.”

Q: If you were just meeting someone, and wanted to communicate the essence of your book, what would you say?

A: There are folks who say God loves you and has a plan for your life. The Sacred Compass says God loves you and has lots of plans for your life. Your life is a pilgrimage. It’s about a trip of going to God. The good, the bad, the happy, the sad, they’re all part of our existence. God is present through it all. Our ways as humans are unique, based on our personalities and life circumstances. God uses all of these, including our ability to be taught and led. At each season, God is with us and working with us.

"Your life is a pilgrimage. It’s about a trip of going to God. The good, the bad, the happy, the sad, they’re all part of our existence. God is present through it all."

Q: Why “sacred compass”?

A: A compass points us in a general direction. It’s not “turn left here, go down the boulevard, then turn right.” In workshops I have people do an exercise of creating a life map, with the different points in their life. “Has it been a straight line – or curvy and twisty?” “Looking back, why do you think you went there? Did you learn something?” The idea is to see our lives as journeys. Often things pop up that people have held down or forgotten.

Q: I really like your idea in the book that it’s important to learn to listen to how lives speak, and that our lives speak in different ways, through our individual dreams, stories, problems, opportunities, inclinations, even our bodies. How did you come to this?

A: Some of it’s based in my own experience, especially my experience of getting out of touch with my body and getting sick. Shortly after I turned 40, a whole bunch of physical stuff started happening to me. My body had been telling me things were going wrong for a while, but I had not been paying attention. Growing up fairly evangelical, I tended to think my body as an unreliable witness. Turns out, it was pretty reliable.

I started thinking, if my body’s telling me about this, what else is it telling me? I started noticing things. When I speak I have some of the same reactions as when I have low blood sugar. So what’s that telling me? That “this is important.” Otherwise I wouldn’t be tense. I never thought of paying attention to my body to teach me about my spirit.

When I researched Sacred Compass, I asked friends about their spiritual experiences. One person talked about God speaking to her through housecleaning; she hates housecleaning so much, God must speak to her through it. There are all these ways God tries to get our attention. Often times, we’re not paying attention.

Q: I like what you say about learning to trust our individual patterns.

A: We decided to start a little worship group out at our farm. I’d been fighting the idea for three years, and it wouldn’t go away. I finally said, “Well, OK.” It was beautiful and persistent and not from some ego need. Lots of signs were coming together. I had to learn to trust them.

Q: What signs speak most to you?

A: Love is a big one. Love is about caring for things. A friend of mine walked across the United States, from New Castle, Indiana, to Washington DC, in a walk for peace. She wore a vest that said, “Pray for Peace.” Some people wanted to join her at times and carry antiwar signs. She asked them not to. The idea of being for peace was much more loving than being against war.

Persistence is also big for me. I get lots of ideas and can get confused. I have friends who are writers who keep a pencil and paper right on their bed stand to write the idea down before they lose it. I’ve gone the other way. I feel if an idea’s still there in the morning or comes to me later that day, it’s worth recalling.

Another important sign for me is a feeling of rightness. “This feels right.” This can be confirmed when we talk with other people, when they say, “Yeah, that feels right for you.”

Q: You talk about the Quaker practice of asking for a clearness committee. Have you been part of clearness committees?

A: I’ve been part of them, and have used them. Sometimes they are formally named. Other times, they’re less formal. I’ve even done them electronically. I have friends across the U.S. and the world who can’t get together but whom I trust as a sounding board.

Q: What’s the difference between a clearness committee and someone telling you what you should do?

A: Clearness committees won’t tell me what I should do. Instead they ask questions that point me back to myself, to Christ my inner teacher. “Why do you think you should do this?” “Why do you think this is the right time for you?”

Q: Is where you’ve wound up where you expected?

A: About the only thing that is where I thought I’d be is the writing part. I always was a reader, and always wanted to be a writer even as a kid. But the rest of my life, no. I never would have ever thought I’d be living on a farm in Indiana with 50 acres, planting prairie grass and trees. I was a city boy. I still am at heart. Hardly anything’s turned out the way I thought it would. It wasn’t a direct route. And I’m exactly where I should be at this time.

Q: Talk about a time when you experienced everything coming together.

A: One of the times it became clearest to me, and probably put me in a place where I could write this book, was when I turned 50 and took a job at the Center for Congregations, and we moved to the Indianapolis area. The responsibilities that were called for in the position brought together almost every position I’d ever held. Even copier sales. I supervised an education program, and that involved conference planning. I had learned to put on trade shows when I was in photocopier sales. So far the only job I haven’t drawn on is running a go-cart track – though maybe I do, because people sometimes seem to be going in circles, so it’s my job to call them in for pit stops.

May 29, 2010

THE GREATEST INSPIRATION CAN BEGIN IN THE PARTICULAR. I was reminded of this while reading Pamela Haines’ article
“Faith and Economics” in the May issue of Friends Journal,
the magazine of contemporary Quaker thought. Haines describes how she pursued a goal that initially seemed beyond her – starting a
conversation among Friends to challenge the way the economy works in our society – by
breaking it down into human-sized actions.

While the essay's focus is her process of
organizing an interest group on the subject at Friends General
Conference’s annual “Gathering” last year, she communicates a larger
idea relevant to this era in which so much seems to be askew: that we
have the right to speak the truth as we seek it. We have the right to take a seat at the table; to say, as Haines does, that there is more to life than “the idolatry of materialism,” that
“unbridled growth comes at the expense of the planet’s integrity,” and that “we can do better.”

Early in life, Haines writes, she learned that “I
had the right to think, to question the standard way of doing things,
and to act.”

Reading the Old Testament this spring for a
class at Earlham School of Religion , I’ve been impressed at just how
grounded that right to question and call to mercy and justice is in Judeo-Christian tradition. In challenging the world – be it to help people suffering in this economy; to prevent environmental catastrophes like massive BP oil spill now spreading through the
Gulf of Mexico (BP photo of the leak below); to end military aggression; or to create a more compassionate workplace – we live out an idea
that goes back thousands of years. We become what one writer calls "present-day Abrahams" bearing witness to "the scandal of the particular."

I think I first heard the story in Genesis 18:22-33 of Abraham persuading God to spare the city of Sodom if 10 righteous people can be found. Studying it again, as an adult, I’ve been amazed at Abraham's feat. It’s not only just Abraham "talks God
down,” as a friend, recalled the other day, smiling at the memory of his
Hebrew school lesson.

It’s how Abraham does it – asking
whether God really wishes to “sweep away the righteous with the wicked”;
appealing to God’s sense of justice (“Shall not the Judge of all the
earth do what is just?”); acknowledging his secondary status in this
negotiation (“I who am but dust and ashes”); admitting he’s pushing
things (“Do not let the Lord be angry if I speak”; “Do not let the Lord
be angry if I speak just once more”); and negotiating God down in
increments, resting his case first on finding 50 righteous people, then
persuading God to accept 45 (“Will you destroy the whole city for lack
of five?”), then 40, 30, and 20, before resting at 10. To which God
says, essentially, all right.

Some scholars don’t seem to know what to make
of this. Is Abraham (depicted below in an earlier encounter with God by the artist Raphael) being shrewd or foolhardy? Compassionate or heretical? In the end, Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed
(presumably, lacking the 10). The New Oxford Annotated Study
Bible deems the story “a theoretical reflection” on
“how many righteous people are required to save a broader group.”

But the passage -- though less famous than other wranglings with the Divine, like Jacob wrestling with the angel, Job arguing with God, and Moses' intervention for the Israelites -- has inspired passion that belies that "theoretical" conclusion. It has been drawn on in calls against war, poverty,
and degradation of the environment. “This story boldly states that what
we do does matter,” writes a minister on the Episcopal Diocese of
Minnesota’s website on environmental stewardship.

Word-Sunday.com, the Catholic
lectionary website, holds it up as a model for
prayer: Abraham is “clear,” “logical,” and “persistent,”
pleading, essentially, “If you are the God of the just, then act with
justice… Be faithful to those who are faithful; be merciful to
those who
treat others with mercy.”

Most striking to me is Nora Gallagher's essay on the website Journey with Jesus (fast becoming a favorite for its interweaving of theology and world events). Within the back-and-forth of Abraham and
God, Gallagher says, is “a wonderful theological idea: the scandal of the
particular.” God, who “‘hung the stars’ and created ‘that great
leviathan just for the sport of it’” can be concerned with the
particular, a tiny group of 10 persons in the vastness of humanity and creation. The "small" is imbued with Divine importance. Archbishop Tutu of South Africa makes a similar point in a recent interview on "Speaking of Faith," saying that everyone, regardless of our station, is a "God carrier."

To Gallagher, this insight is more than a small-is-beautiful-type sentiment. It speaks truth. Individual
human experience binds us in a special way. It's attested every day in the media in the photos of individuals; in the ability of stories to inspire, anger, sadden in a way that statistics or statements about aggregates like "nation" cannot. Gallagher quotes the philosopher Hannah Arendt: “I don’t love ‘groups.’ I can only love persons.”

This interdependence calls us to speak up and be
“present-day Abrahams,” says Gallagher. She cites the example of 150
scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project who petitioned President
Truman to not drop the bomb on Japan. That Truman overrode
their decision is a tragedy that will forever haunt. “Our lives begin to
end,” says Gallagher, “on the day that we are silent about things that
matter.”

**

For
more on Friends Journal, a magazine that I am a major fan of
(and, full disclosure!, a member of the board of trustees of), please
visit Friends Journal.

To
read “Reflection on Genesis 18:20-33,” by the Rev. Wanda Copeland, in
the lectionary of the Episcopal Diocese of Minnesota’s Environmental
Stewardship Commission, please click on Reflection on Genesis 18:20-33.

To
read Larry Broding's essay on what Abraham teaches us about prayer on the Catholic lectionary
resource Word-Sunday.com, please click on Negotiating with God.

May 18, 2010

I REACHED THIS WEEK FOR FAITH
AND PRACTICE, the book that Quakers turn to for guidance on how to live
their lives in accordance with the testimonies and beliefs of Quakerism, to see
what it says about debt. I was surprised to find that it says virtually
nothing. At least that’s the case with the version I use most often, from my
yearly meeting.

That’s a shame. The first generations of Quakers had a lot
to say on the subject. With the U.S. struggling to crawl out of a financial
collapse and recession brought on by a decade-long debt-fueled spending spree,
our society could benefit from a point of view that looks at debt from a spiritual context.

I’m not an expert on Quaker history; someone may jump in with a more seasoned perspective. But my sense from readings over the years and being part of Friends meetings is that early Quakers
would say that the piling-on of debt in contemporary consumer culture through
credit cards, mortgages, equity lines, lines of credit, personal loans,
business loans, student debt, et al, has exacted spiritual as well as financial
costs. It's hard to be spiritually free if you're encumbered with debt.

“Owe no man anything but love,” in the words of George
Fox (pictured), the founder of Quakerism.

According to Israel Grubb’s history Quakerism and Industry before
1800, Quakers were not opposed per se to
debt. Securing financing was a fact of life. Records from the 1600s and
1700s, in fact, show Quaker meetings advanced funds to help members start
businesses, buy tools and materials for their businesses, and acquire training. (The generosity wasn't limited to financing; meetings also helped Friends find jobs and provided care for Friends in need.)

Cork Meeting, for instance, loaned £4 John
Hartford to buy materials for his trade. Dublin Meeting advanced £3 to help
Richard Lloyd start a business, extended £5 to John Ashton to buy leather for
his trade, and bought a loom for J. Baggiley. Meetings also recorded repayments
of debt; one meeting said it'd received £20 from a young Friend it’d help relocate to Pennsylvania.

But Friends also warned followers of the dangers of being over-extended – “trading beyond your ability” and “stretching beyond
your compass,” in the language of the day. They offered advice on managing
money, and stepped in on occasion to help Friends avoid bankruptcy. Their
cautions on debt were often stern. Going into debt to support a lifestyle was
especially disdained. George Fox deemed people who lived on credit “wasters of
other men’s goods” and “destroyers” of resources that could be put to better
use.

Such words may sound harsh to today’s ears. But how Friends
managed their money, as all of life, was seen as an expression of one’s faith.
Religion was not separated from daily affairs but “lived out through them,”
Grubb writes.

From my readings, the message I take away from early Friends
is that debt, as often as not, gets in the way of faith. It
complicates life, posing conflict with the Quaker belief in simplicity. It
can lead to turmoil – stress, sleeplessness, tension in relationships, late fees, and, if it progresses, calls from collection agencies, foreclosure, and
bankruptcy – creating conflicting with other Quaker
principles including peace and integrity.

Though modern advertising often presents debt as leading to
abundance – enabling us to buy to our hearts’ desires, create “priceless”
moments, be “everywhere you want to be,” “tap” our equity, and be members of a
special club that “has its privileges” – debt can also cut us off from
paths we’re spiritually led to. The more bills we have, the harder it is to pursue a leading. Can we really “let our lives speak” if we’re
weighed down by debt?

To early Friends, it was important to stay flexible. It was
not uncommon for Friends to step back from paid work periodically to devote
themselves to good works. Thomas Chalkley. for example, noted in his journal
that, having “got a little money” from his work, “a little being enough,” he
planned to now devote himself to “the work and service of my great master Jesus
Christ.”

Some of what early Friends said and did seems strange from a
modern vantage. In addition to proffering advice, meetings sometimes asked to
look at members’ finances. Quaker elders in Ireland in 1702 ordered a “strict
and diligent inspection into the condition and circumstances of all Friends,”
with followers asked to “cast up their accounts, debt, and credit,” to address
concerns that people were “falling into debts beyond what they have to pay.”
One meeting separately reported that “to our great grief,” members were not paying their
debts punctually.

But in an era when Friends, as an upstart, disapproved sect, were subject to religious persecution, and debtors prison was a threat to all,
debt was a big deal.

A friend notes that there are times when debt makes sense, to pay down in increments something you couldn't cover all at once. That's true. But I wonder if meetings could do more to help people practice spiritual discernment about when those times are. Should we offer clearness or oversight committees on money decisions at different stages of life? Should we be updating Faith and Practice and holding breakfast
discussions and conference seminars on debt?

With millions of people today caught up in the “virtual
debtors’ prison” of foreclosure and bankruptcy, Quakers’ timeworn wisdom could have new value.

Friends’ blend of common sense and Spirit could offer a new voice to other conversations as well -- for instance, the
modern application of the biblical “jubilee year” of debt forgiveness.

While the Old Testament talks about debt forgiveness (e.g.
Deuteronomy 15:1 “Every seventh year you shall grant a remission of debts”) and
counsels against charging interest (e.g. Exodus 22:25’s advice not to “exact
interest” from "the poor among you"), I struggle to find Biblical advice on taking on debt. The closest I come is
Deuteronomy 15:6 “you will lend to many nations, but you will not borrow,” but that’s
a prescription to nations.

A good starting point for conversation could be
this sentence from Christian Faith and
Practice, from London Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends (which has a
bit more to say on the subject of debt): “From its earliest days our Society
has laid great stress on honesty in business and the payment in full of debts
justly incurred.” I particularly like the emphasis on “debts justly incurred” in context of consumers and Third World
countries who have been inveigled into debts they couldn’t afford.

Or there's advice 15 from "Advices from the Elders at Balby," from 1656, the one mention of debt in my Faith and Practice, tucked back in the section on the history of Quakerism: "Friends in callings and trades are to be faithful and upright, and keep to yea and nay. Debts to be punctually paid, that nothing they may owe to any man but love to one another."

**

Israel Grubb's Quakerism and Industry before 1800, the primary source for the Quaker anecdotes in this essay, appears regrettably to be out of print. I was fortunate to be able to read a copy earlier this year while in Richmond, IN, for a class at Earlham School of Religion.

May 14, 2010

“YOU HAVE A CHOICE!” THE DECLARATION, from a woman in Detroit trying to stop a
foreclosure, captured in Michael Moore’s recent film, Capitalism: A Love Story, has been echoing through my week.

As have two stories in the morning paper. One, headlined “In a Job Market Realignment, Some Workers No Longer Fit,”
unspools
the unsettling truth that many of the jobs lost in the recession
resulting from
the 2007-8 financial collapse
“are not coming back.” “I know I’m
good at this,” says a 52-year-old
administrative assistant who’s been out of work for two years. “So how
the hell
did I end up here?” The other story, “Prosecutors Ask if 8 Banks Duped Rating Agencies,” peeled back
another other layer of the inside machinations of the collapse. Says one discomforted insider who knew something was wrong, “I
can’t tell you how upset I have been in reviewing these trades.”

I don’t profess to have a direct line Upstairs. But I think
something deep and spiritual speaks to us through others. In the voices of the people
being quoted in films and stories in these hard times, I believe, is a
prophetic voice for our times. It’s a voice of anger, frustration, and
bewilderment. And it’s a voice carrying moral weight, reflected, for example, in the three priests
quoted in Moore’s film, who call the current economy “immoral,” “obscene,”
“outrageous,” and “radically evil,” and warn that “in some form and fashion God
will come down” and punish capitalism. It is a voice that says to our society,
like the woman to the foreclosure officers, that we have choices.

A parallel voice can be found in scripture. More than 2,500
years ago, the biblical prophet Amos sounded a similar warning. He denounced the
exploitation of the poor that he saw in Israel. “They sell the righteous for a pair of sandals… They trample the head
of the poor into the dust of the earth, and push the afflicted out of the way…
They lay themselves down beside every altar on garments taken in
pledge…and…drink wine bought with fines they imposed.”(Amos 2:6-8)

Amos criticized the consumer culture of the affluent, with its preening over lying on “beds of ivory,” being anointed with “the finest
oils,” and real-estate-pride of “the winter house and
summer
house” and homes “of hewn stone” (6:4-6, 3:15, 5:11). He challenged the country’s smug patriotism, pointing to the
countries surrounding Israel, and asking, “Are you better than those
kingdoms?” (6:2). He questioned which gods Israel really worshiped
– the god of Israel, or “Sakkuth,” “Kaiwan,” “your images, which you made for
your self” (5:26) – and disparaged the false piety of going to church then
putting it all aside the other six days of the week. “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn
assemblies” (5:21).

Instead of “burnt offerings and grain offerings” (5:22),
said Amos, God desires justice. “Let
justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream”
(5:24), he says in one of the Old Testament's most famous passages.Following God, he says, means doing good. “Seek
good…that you may live…and the Lord…will be with you. Hate evil and love good,
and establish justice in the gate” (5:14-15).

As one modern theologian writes, reading Amos today feels
“like a blast of cold, clean air.” And with good reason. Amos was called to
prophecy in a time like ours. According to The
New Oxford Annotated Bible, Israel
was reaching “a height of territorial expansion and national prosperity.” That
prosperity “led to gross inequities between urban elites and the poor.” By
“manipulation of debt and credit,” the wealthy amassed capital and estates at
the expense of small farmers.” Those loans became “a wedge” that separated
farmers from “their land and personal liberty.”

Amos was the “consummate outsider,” “blue collar rather than
blue-blooded,” “a farmer from little Tekoa, about 12 miles southeast of Jerusalem,” says Daniel Clendenin,
author, professor, and founder of the website Journey with Jesus. Not
surprisingly, given his critique of the culture, the elites of his day "despised Amos as a redneck.” They
tried to run him out of town.

Rereading Amos this week, I’ve been wondering if there
should be an “Amos day” – a Sunday in which every house of worship across the
country turns over its services and education programs to reflecting on Amos’
message. Doing so might give comfort to those afflicted in this economy; they are not alone. It
might prod those who are in positions of responsibility in business,
government, the media, and other institutions, to take action –
through their decisions, investments, purchases, and other actions – to create a more just
economy.And it could bring a moral,
spiritual dimension to a discussion that all too often seems to be dry and remote, about regulations more than spiritual intent.

What would Amos say today? Would he growl out his prophecies
in a rock band, on YouTube, or in rallies on Wall Street and Washington? Would he proclaim, “They buy sports cars with the fees they’ve
taken from CDOs of subprime mortgages”? “Your offer of a new wing of the library
won’t make up for the way you earned your money”? “You have built mcmansions
but you shall not live in them”? Would he, too, say “You
have a choice”?

***

There’s a lot of
good writing on Amos’ relevance for modern times on the Web. Daniel Clendenin’s
essay on Amos, “Growing Strong By
Destroying Others:To
the ‘Notable Men of the Foremost Nation,’” though written in 2007, before the crash, is particularly good:

May 11, 2010

SHOOTS OF SNAP PEAS POPPED UP from the ground this week. Nearby the first flowers have appeared on the tomatoes. Hyacinth vines that in a few months will cast showers of purple on the side of our house, stand in a row an inch or so tall. The Irises, allium, and salvia are in bloom.

Our garden is a small space, two patches on either side of the driveway and a border along the postage-stamp back yard. But when I step into it, even if it’s en route somewhere else – leaving for work in the morning, for example – I feel I’m entering sacred space.

At this time of year, I’m stopped by the miracle and mystery of life springing forth. Before long, with the right mix of sun and rain, it will be wonder at ripening tomatoes, basil, string beans, rosemary, and greens.

Over the years, I’ve come to respect that different people experience the sacred in different places and ways. For some it is entering a timeworn place of worship: a spare, simple Quaker meetinghouse with worn benches, or an ancient, spacious cathedral. For others it is in nature. One friend goes to the beach; sitting there, with the ocean stretching out before her, the waves coming in, she feels closest to God. My Dad feels it looking out onto his farm in summer, the wheat, corn, and soybeans shimmering in the breeze.

Reading the Old Testament for school this spring, though, I’ve been wondering if I’ve placed too narrow a boundary on sacred space. Encounters with the sacred can happen anywhere in scripture. Jacob is visited by God in a dream one night on his journey from Beer-sheba toward Haran (Genesis 28:12). Moses is called by God speaking through a burning bush on MountHoreb (Exodus 3:2).

In one of his lectures, the poet David Whyte says that for him the moment of “sudden insight” for Moses – what in Zen is called “kensho,” revelation into one’s true nature – comes not when God calls to Moses, telling him to “take off your shoes, you are standing on holy ground.” (Ex 3:5: “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”) Rather, it is when Moses looks down, Whyte says, and realizes “in the echo of the voice, not only was he standing on holy ground but had been for the whole of his days.”

My professor probably would call that “gap-filling.” The Old Testament does not say what goes through Moses’ mind. It’s a gap in the narrative. Moses’ first words – after God has gone on to reveal that He has heard the misery of the Israelites in their enslavement in Egypt, has “come down to deliver them” to a “land flowing with milk and honey,” and wants Moses to go to the Pharaoh to seek their release – are astonishment: “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?”

But I think David Whyte makes a good point. Who is to say but that the ground we’ve been walking on the whole of our days is holy? Rather than trying to confine sacred space, maybe we should think of it as expansive, reaching beyond our safe, predictable sacred spaces of church and nature to wherever we may be.

Would it change how we are at work? How we are with others? How we approach tasks? Would we work harder? Do something else? Would it change how we are in the quotidian tasks of life, in the subway, the supermarket, bringing the kids to school, paying the bills? Would we be more present? More charitable? Stronger in our convictions? Would we see and hear more of the life unfolding around us and be more aligned with what Whyte calls “the particular conversation with the deity, with God and Creation, the ground itself,” that only we can have?

Once, after reading a poem on Moses’ encounter, Whyte was approached by a rabbinical student who offered a further insight. In the original language, the student said, the word in God’s command to Moses to “take off” his shoes is “the word that is used for an animal shedding its skin.” In that moment when we have an encounter that takes us beyond ourselves, we go through “a falling away of old skins.”

We all need a “periodic molting” to reveal new possibilities, Whyte says. While that can happen stepping into the garden and being awakened anew to the mystery of new life, it can also happen at any time, anywhere, perhaps when we expect it least.

May 08, 2010

WHEN I READ THAT A 31-YEAR-OLD WALL STREET BROKER had joked
in an email about selling toxic investments to “widows and orphans,” my first reaction was shock. Did he realize what he was saying?!?

My response
turned briefly to empathy. Who hasn’t said something in a private email that they’d
be mortified having repeated in public?

Then the question shifted back outward.
Does Wall Street see how much trouble its language gets it into with Main Street?

The firm and the broker issued
quick apologies. The incident reflected “very badly on the firm and on myself,”
the broker said. He noted that his customers, in fact, are institutions, not
individuals.

Still, I’ve been wondering if
there’s a larger lesson to be drawn.

Perhaps new employees at public-facing
businesses, as part of their training, should be asked to spend an afternoon
searching through the references to “widows and orphans” in the Bible, Torah or
other treasured text, then spend some time reading how the phrase comes up on
the Internet. And maybe give a brief presentation on what they learn. Call it
language/values sensitivity training.

They might get a better
understanding of how that email, sent in 2007 by Fabrice Tourre, a Goldman
Sachs broker, to his girlfriend, and released recently in response to the
federal Securities and Exchange Commission’s fraud lawsuit against Goldman,
struck such a deep nerve.

And how, by within a week, it generated
5.2 million hits in Google, everywhere from The
Wall Street Journal (which deemed its “dark humor” reflective of the
“take-no-prisoners” mindset of the firm) to The
Washington Post (which called the broker “a Michael Milken for the current
times”) to Al-Jazeera (for which it
was business as usual in America: “Goldman ‘boasted as market crashed,’” read
its headline).

Some words are sacred to people. They’re vested with thousands of years of
religious meaning. “Widows and orphans” is among them. The phrase is at the
heart of a moral life in the Judeo-Christian tradition. “Religion that is pure
and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows
in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained in the world” (James 1:26).

It comes up early. “You shall not
abuse any widow or orphan” is among the commandments passed down to Moses
(Exodus 22:22). It is echoed by prophets, who call on their audiences to “plead
for the widow” (Isaiah 1:17) and “oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless,
the stranger, nor the poor” (Zachariah 7:10).

And it comes up often. In all,
“widows” appears more than 90 times and “orphans” or the “fatherless” more than
40 in the Bible (“religion,” interestingly, appears only five times).

Most are in the Old Testament.
There, we are called to care for the vulnerable and defenseless. Deuteronomy
says to setting aside a portion of one’s harvest for “the alien, the orphan,
the widow” – “grapes of your vineyard,” olives from the boughs of their trees,
and gleanings from the field (Deut 24:19-21).

Doing so aligns one with faith
tradition. God has a special concern for the marginalized, establishing a
“border for the widow” (Proverbs 15:25) and bringing “justice for the orphan
and widow” (Deut 10:18).

It is a reminder to be humble. “Remember
that you were a slave in the land
of Egypt,” says
Deuteronomy. You never know but that one day one or a loved one could be in
that same place – crying out, as in Lamentations, “we have become orphans,
fatherless, our mothers are like widows” (Lam 5:3).

Not
caring, in contrast, sets one against tradition. “If you do abuse them, when
they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry” and respond with “wrath,” Exodus
continues. Job, searching for explanations for his suffering, asks if he’s done
harm to widows (Job 31:16).

Linking ethical acts with spirituality,
as these texts do – the care of the vulnerable with “obligations to God,” the
“humanitarian” with the “religious” – and making that bond “unconditional,” is
significant, says The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Actions
carry importance beyond being the right thing to do. They can be expressions of
the sacred. They bring religion to human scale, showing it’s not just what we
believe but what we do with that belief.

Many on Wall Street know all this.
Many firms have charitable arms. Living in New York, one sees the results in the
charitable giving, both from financial firms and individuals in the industry,
supporting AIDS care, food banks, shelters, museums, education, parks, and the arts.
Goldman Sachs is a case in point; its Goldman Sachs Foundation has given away
more than $100 million in grants in 200 countries promoting education.

But the culture of Wall Street –
the brusque, master-of-the-universe mindset popularized in books and films like
Liars Poker, Barbarians at the Gate, Bonfire of the Vanities, Wall Street, Boiler
Room, and Capitalism: A Love Story –
can talk a different language. “Widows and orphans” is a case in point. Wall
Street has its own take on the words, both benign (a “widow and orphan stock”
is a low-risk stock that can be counted on to generate income “through
difficult financial times,” says the website Investopedia) and aggressive
(“widows and orphans” is “Wall Street’s traditional euphemism for unsuspecting
investors,” notes the UK
newspaper The Independent).

Courts of law will ultimately
decide whether Wall Street firms have committed fraud in the financial
meltdown, as the government claims in the Goldman case. But there’s also the
court of public opinion.

With the country trying to crawl
back from the financial collapse and recession, and Main Street convinced that
Wall Street has profited from its suffering – and speaks, literally, a
different language – it’s an opportune time for the financial world to show
that, at least, when it comes to words, it gets it.

**

The Wall Street Journal, I think, has been particularly strong in its coverage of the
Goldman case and the controversial emails. Here are two examples:

This American Life, the National Public Radio program, has
done terrific explanatory work on the causes and consequences of the financial
meltdown. “Inside Job,” a co-production with ProPublica, is, I think,
Pulitzer-worthy – and closes with a wonderfully arch Broadway production
number, “Bet against the American Dream.”

There is a wealth
of good non-scholarly writing on the Web from individuals wrestling with scripture’s
implications today. One that has stayed with me was from an evangelical
videographer working in the Sudan.
Reflecting on the conflict there, which has killed so many men, leaving behind
wives and children, brings James 1:26 into the present: “Religion that God our
Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: that WE provide for those who
cannot provide for themselves.” See his videos, too:

At Goldman Sachs' annual meeting on May 7, chairman/ceo Lloyd Blankfein, responding to criticism that the firm needed to better serve the public and economy, said events had created "an opportunity to be introspective," and promised that the firm would review its practices:

May 02, 2010

I HAVE A FRIEND WHO, A FEW YEARS AGO, HAD IT ALL. HIS business was booming. His large, sprawling family was the envy of everyone with four beautiful, athletic kids, and a cherished, loving wife. They had a nice house. And a second house on a lake. They drove new cars.

Then the recession hit. The business folded. They lost the lake house. They lost the home. They gave up the second car. They moved into a small apartment. Money is tight.

But the family is good. The kids – now out in the world, in college and first jobs – are still beautiful. My friend has had a few fits and starts in the job market; so far nothing’s worked out.

That’s left him time to cultivate life. In a few weeks, he plans to run a half-marathon with his oldest daughter. On weekends, he and his wife take walks in the state park. He checks in on his mother-in-law.

They’re not rich, but they still have a rich life.

I’ve been thinking of my friend the past few weeks since reading the biblical book of Ecclesiastes for a class I’m taking at Earlham School of Religion. Its message of adjusting and accepting seems to speak to what my friend, and the 15 million others in this country displaced by the recession, are going through.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die;

A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal;

A time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh;

A time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to seek, and a time to lose;

A time to keep, and a time to throw away;

A time to tear, and a time to sew;

A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate;

A time for war, and a time for peace.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Biblical scholars say Ecclesiastes was written in a time much like the present. The New Oxford Annotated Bible (NOAB) says the period after the Israelites returned from exile, about 2,500 years ago, saw “tremendous economic activity.” Money became prized, “a commodity desired for its own sake.” It was a time of opportunity; even the poor “could become wealthy.”

But with that came economic volatility and widespread insecurity. Some became wealthy, while others lost out – raising questions of why and how this was happening. Into this gap, the NOAB says, the author of Ecclesiastes – the title translates to “Gatherer” or “Acquirer” – offered an explanation of a world, that was “contradictory, if not altogether absurd,” and of human attempts to control life. (The image at left is by the artist Gustave Dore.)

The world, says Ecclesiastes, is larger than our understanding. Sometimes our efforts pay off. But other times it is not “the season,” and there is no easy explanation. Trying to explain it, says Ecclesiastes, in what becomes a recurring theme, is “vanity and chasing after wind.” (Ecc 2:11).

Instead, Ecclesiastes extols accepting and appreciating the gifts that life gives. That can mean simple pleasures – savoring “your bread with enjoyment and…your wine with a merry heart” (9:7). Appreciating the light of the day; “light is sweet, and it is pleasant…to see the sun” (11:7). Being there for loved ones; “enjoy life with the wife whom you love” (9:9). Not getting caught up in possessions (“eyes are never satisfied with riches,” 4:7) or worry (“banish anxiety,” 11:10).

It must have seemed like a radical message in its day. The dominant message of the Old Testament is to strive. Seek the promise land. Be fruitful and multiply. Do good. Hard work produces results. “Honor the Lord with your substance, and…your barns will be filled with plenty,” as Proverbs 3:9-10 says.

Ecclesiastes is not exactly arguing against striving. One of the most-quoted passages in the book (and the motto of my daughter’s high school) encourages that “whatever your hand finds to do, do with thy might” (Ecc 9:10). We should “take pleasure” in our toil (3:13), “enjoy” our work (3:22), and “follow the inclinations” of our heart (11:9).

But it is saying to check your motivation. Don’t do something for a the result you hope it will bring. As another famous passage says, “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all” (Ecc 9:11). Or, as a 12-step friend says, we’re not in the outcomes business. (Ecclesiastes resonates with many friends in 12-step programs.)

Some people see Ecclesiastes as the odd-book-out in the Bible – too gloomy and world-weary. But, reading it, then rereading it, these past few weeks, I think it’s well-rooted in the spirituality of the Old Testament. Its message that we humans are not as in-control as we’d like to think is like the lesson of the Tower of Babel. Its connectedness to God and Creation in places sounds like Genesis. Nature and God's majesty play large roles in this book. Ecclesiastes' pronouncement of “vanity” seems like God’s message to Job. When we try to fill in God’s blanks, we come up empty-handed (vanity’s Latin root is “empty”).

Better, when we’re disappointed, to step back, reflect, be humble. Remember, says Ecclesiastes, that it’s God’s work that “endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it.” Sometimes what we’re supposed to do just to “stand in awe” (Ecc 3:11-14).

That may be hard in times like this. But I think it would be reassuring for my friend to know that someone in a time like this 2,500 years ago struggled with questions he’s struggling with now, and found hard-earned wisdom.

April 25, 2010

BEFORE WE TURN THE PAGE ON THE financial crisis that brought
down the world economy two years ago, I hope that someone high up in Washington
or Wall Street reflects in a very public way – say, on 60 Minutes or the Op-Ed page of The
Wall Street Journal – on the lessons of the biblical book of Leviticus for
our present predicament, in particular Lev 19:11, 13, and 35-36. While Washington is rushing to
tighten regulations to prevent future meltdowns, there’s a larger, social loophole
that’s not being addressed: How do we create a culture of responsibility in
business?

Within these
Old Testament texts, by tradition handed down from God to Moses, and passed down
from generation to generation for thousands of years, I think, is a good starting point
for answering that question:

“You shall not steal; you shall not deal
falsely; and you shall not lie to one another.” (Lev 19:11)

“You shall not defraud your
neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of
a laborer until morning.” (Lev 19:13)

“You shall not cheat in measuring
length, weight or quantity. You shall have honest balances, honest weights, and
honest ephah, and an honest hin.” (Lev 19:35-36)

Don’t steal. Don’t lie. Don’t
defraud. Don’t hold back income that is due to someone. Don’t cheat your
customer. (“Ephah” and “hin,” if you’re wondering, are ancient measures of dry
and liquid weight.)

It seems like a modest
prescription. We’re not talking about giving everything away to the poor here
(that’s for another day). I've recently started taking seminary classes (a longtime dream), and reading the Old Testament have been having "what if" moments -- like, what if Leviticus' rules for business had been posted up and down the business world and taught in business schools and employee training? Would we have avoided:

Banks giving mortgages to people
who had no hope of ever paying them back (“Saying Yes to Anyone, WaMu Built
Empire on Shaky Loans,” headline, The New
York Times, 12/28/2008)…

….then selling the risky loans to Wall
Street firms, who then packaged them into securities and selling them to
unwitting investors who wound up holding the bag (“Securitized Loans Are 5x
More Likely to be Delinquent,” headline in the Wall Street blog The Big Picture, 10/19/2009)…

No doubt people at these companies feel they were putting
customers first; Goldman Sachs, for one, intends to contest its fraud charges.
But many had questions. “We
were giving loans to people that never should have had loans,” a bank
employee is quoted in one story. “Garbage in, garbage out,” said another employee. A worker at one ratings
agency complained his firm had become so beholden to its big customers, it developed
“Stockholm syndrome” (NYT, 4/23/2010).
“We rate everything,” said another employee. “It could be structured by cows and we
would rate it” (NYT, 10/22/08).

Yes, I know the old saw that “business
ethics is a contradiction in terms.” For decades the orthodoxy in business has
been that companies have only one “social responsibility”: as the economist
Milton Friedman put it in a famous 1970 essay, “to increase its profits.” Or in
the famous words of
Gordon Gekko, the tycoon in the movie Wall
Street, “greed is good.”

But
Friedman left a door open. While maintaining that business should “make as much
money as possible,” he allowed that executives needed to conform to “the basic
rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical
custom.” Does an ancient biblical commandment to be fair and just count as an
ethical custom? I’d say yes.

At the
advent of capitalism, the Bible was part of the
conversation in business. George Fox, the early leader in my faith tradition, Quakerism,
regularly inveighed upon his followers to “deal justly,” “speak the truth,”
keep “just” weights, and be so straightforward in their business that “a child
may come among you and not be wronged.” Quaker businesses listened, and created innovations like a
set, fair price. It turned out to be not only the "right" thing to do but also popular – and
profitable. Good ethics was good business.

One might
argue that Bible says a lot of
things. But, unlike some ideas that pop up, then recede, the business commandments continue through the course of the Bible. They’re repeated in Deuteronomy. They’re echoed in Proverbs: “A false
balance is an abomination to the Lord, but an accurate weight is his delight”
(Pro 11:1). They’re at the heart of what the Old Testament prophets decried in
the world, alongside prophetic broadsides on ignoring the needs of the poor, children,
and widows, and idolizing false gods (all, also, applicable to today’s
problems).

Reading the
prophet Amos’ grievances – of the powerful selling “the righteous for silver
and the needy for a pair of Nikes” (check that, “sandals”); trampling the poor;
taking bribes; and pushing aside the needy (Amos 2:6,7, 5:12) – it’s fair to
ask: What would Amos say today?

April 22, 2009

SOME YEARS AGO, FRIENDS IN MY QUAKER MEETING WITH GENEROUS hearts and flexible schedules started an informal taxi service to give people rides to the airport. They didn’t ask to be paid for their efforts; instead, they asked riders to send a check to a Quaker non-profit group such as the Powell House retreat center or the Friends Committee on National Legislation. Most people need a ride to the airport at some time or another, they reasoned. Why not give the $50-$100 to a good cause instead of a car service - and, as an added benefit, go to the airport with a friend?

With the recession, people in our meeting are talking about expanding the “Quaker taxi” idea to include yard work, gardening, spring-cleaning, cooking soups, baking cakes, sewing, whatever people feel led to offer. In the next few weeks, we hope to ask people in the meeting community if there are services they would be willing to donate (e.g. “Jon B., available on Saturdays to do gardening, including digging, planting, weeding, raking”). We’ll then collect and post the information in places where everyone can easily find it like the meetinghouse (pictured), and place their order. With donations down because of the economy, non-profit groups can really use the money.

We're not alone. Community groups, churches, NGOs, businesses, and other entities around the world are engaged in responding creatively to this economy. Search “responding creatively to recession” on Google, and you get 20,000-plus mentions about public service projects, theaters, businesses, community groups, churches, investors, and more. A Methodist church in my community just completed a series of workshops to help people learn new skills, from budgeting, to doing job searches online, to retirement planning.

Drawing inspiration from the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30), my father's Quaker church in Indiana gave its members $10 in coins and challenged them to tap their talents to turn that initial investment into something more to support the church's ministries. Some cooked. Some did home projects. We had terrific pecan pie and dinner rolls at the holidays baked by one member of the church. One person rented a carpet cleaner, organized a work crew, and cleaned rugs.

This weekend, I'm joining a group of activists in Brooklyn for "Soup and Strategy" to talk about creating new, community-based responses to the economy.

All this collective energy is likely going to be the next chapter in the unfolding story of the recession. Learning how people responded to hard times in the past (which I blogged about last week) – how they were opened to new worlds, connected to higher truths, and took on big issues – is really only the first step. We need to take the next step of asking how we will respond. What should we do with what we’ve been given? How can we get out of ourselves and into the world? Can we turn anxiety into action? “Let your lives speak,” as an old Quaker saying advises.

Right now, it seems, the main message in the media coverage is that people feel worried and alone. “Recession Anxiety Seeps into Everyday Life,” a recent example from TheNew York Times, reported that even people who have not lost their jobs, homes or savings are beset with fears of “losing everything.” Therapists are reporting a “huge effect” in their patients. Polls show 80% of Americans feel significant stress over the economy, and 27% losing sleep over money. One person interviewed for the story said she became obsessed with reading everything she could get hold of about the economy and became “so sick to my stomach” she “lost 12 pounds” and “was unable to function.”

The Times’ story goes onto state an oft-repeated idea that the Depression generation was somehow different than people today. One woman says she’s ashamed of how she’s reacting; her parents’ generation, she says, held to a belief that “you pull yourself up.”

I don’t think that's quite right. Reading histories of the Depression, I’ve been struck by how similar Americans then seemed. Like us, they had come through a period of incredible economic growth, with innovative new consumer products (automobiles, the radio, home appliances), and belief that there would be no turning back (“a chicken in every pot, two cars in every garage,” in the words of Herbert Hoover’s 1928 campaign promise). The years of prosperity in the Roaring 20s and assurances from business and government leaders that “such conditions had become permanent” created a “widespread confidence that bordered on complacency,” writes historian David Kyvig.

Then it all unraveled. It wasn’t just the great 1929 stock market crash. There was also a real estate crash (like today). And a credit crunch (like today). “Nobody trusted banks or brokerage houses anymore,” writes historian Hugh Brogan. The auto and home industries, which had come to depend on consumers buying on credit, went into tailspins. Auto sales would not again reach their 1929 level until the late 1940s. There was “an epidemic” of mortgage defaults.

When Franklin Roosevelt on gaining the presidency in 1933 proclaimed, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” he was speaking to real concerns. People were fearful. The economy kept getting worse. Unemployment, which was just 4% in 1928, hit 23% in 1932. Four in 10 homes were in foreclosure. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted to a paltry 41 in 1932, a drop of 89% from 1929 (the crevasse-like descent in chart at right). Men abandoned their families and hit the road to look for work. Divorces rose. While some people found common cause, like the heroes of Studs Terkel's Hard Times that I blogged about last week, many people isolated. The sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd, in a follow-up to their landmark study Middletown, found that church attendance had fallen in Muncie, Indiana. Entertaining at home also declined. People didn’t feel they had enough to share beyond their family.

There’s good reason to think things won’t get as bad today. The government has intervened much earlier. And, where people in the Great Depression had to turn to private charity – whose resources were quickly overwhelmed – there is something of a government safety net today.

Which brings us back to response.

America responded late to the Depression – it took more than three years for significant action. But, when the nation responded, it responded with big ideas. Many things we take for granted today have their roots in the Great Depression. My grandfather’s farm in Indiana got electricity in the 1930s because of the Rural Electrification Administration; my Dad still remembers the joy of being a kid and opening and shutting the refrigerator door and turning the lights on and off.

If you’ve just enjoyed a weekend, or are looking forward to one, thank the Fair Labor Standards Act. The act standardized the minimum wage, overtime pay for more than 40 hours per week, and the two-day weekend. Many of FDR’s big ideas, like Social Security, started outside government with calls from ordinary citizens.

So think big. This may be the time for health care for all Americans. Or think small – is there a way to redirect purchases we’re making anyway to support a good cause? But history suggests that this is a time to turn thoughts into action.

***

David Kyvig’s book Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1940, is a good introduction to how ordinary Americans were affected by the boom and bust of the Roaring 1920s and the Great Depression. To learn more, or to buy a copy:

While we're on the subject, I’m also huge fan of Timothy Egan’s book The Worst Hard Times, which chronicles the lives of Midwesterners who lived through the dust bowl, the Great Depression’s worst ecological disaster:

April 13, 2009

I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU, BUT I'VE FOUND IT HARD TO NOT be distracted by this recession. As the housing and stock markets have crashed and unemployment has gone up, I've thrown myself more into my paid job. I've worked longer hours, spent more time traveling, and devoted more of my non-working hours to thinking about work. I've put more hours into money as well, paying down our credit-card debt, staying on top of bills, and thinking about our finances.

But it’s increasingly dawning on me that this effort has not
made me happier. It’s made me put off things I want to do at this stage of my
life. Keeping up this blog, for one. (Yes, the irony of work standing in
the way of writing on work and spirituality has not been lost on me – insight trail, indeed!)

Similarly, for the past month, an application for a Masters of Divinity
program has been sitting on my bookshelf, while I’ve been wondering if I really should pursue a graduate degree if I haven’t worked out all the details about how to pay for it.

A little prudence is a good thing. But, unchecked, it can
be a wall of worry separating us from the life we can live.

Lately I’ve been finding inspiration from Hard Times, Studs Terkel’s book of interviews with survivors of the Great Depression. Where the mainstream media has lately been nibbling at the edges of lessons from past downturns – focusing
on the Depression’s consumer lessons (the joy of thrift, darning socks,
vegetable gardens, thrift stores, etc.) – Terkel’s subjects chronicle larger,
deeper lessons. Here are four:

Hard times open new
worlds.In addition to devastation and deprivation, many of the people interviewed by Terkel (photo) look back on the Depression as a time that opened them up to different
ways of looking at the world, and changed them for the better. One, Peggy
Terry, took off hitchhiking through the Southwest with her husband – while
pregnant. She found that people “were really nice.” People fed them. They
offered them places to stay. As they traveled on, she found that people who
she’d thought were different from her, in fact, weren’t so different. And she found herself
questioning the way things were in this country – wondering, for instance, why Franklin Roosevelt had so
many cuff links, “with rubies and precious stones,” when so many went hungry,
“the first time I remember ever wondering why.” Decades later, she remained
sympathetic to outsiders, even to those burning down buildings in the urban
unrest of the 1960s. “You get law and order when people are allowed to be
decent human beings.”

Hard times connect us
to higher truths.One of the most amazing stories in Hard Times is Claude Williams, a Southern preacher. Taking as his
text “Go into the world and preach the gospel to every nation,” Williams
decided it was his calling to welcome everyone to his church, regardless of race or
ethnicity. He was promptly fired. He started preaching in black churches and in
coal-mining towns; he helped the miners organize and win a strike. He was
beaten by deputies (“my real induction”) and defrocked by his mainline,
traditional church (prompting him to seek ordination in an African-American
church) – and converted hundreds to his causes.

He took inspiration from a controversial source: the Bible. He saw the Bible as “a workingman’s
book.” “The prophets – Moses, Amos, Isaiah, the Son of Man, Old Testament and
New – you’ll find they were fighting for justice and freedom,” he tells Terkel.
“On the other side, you find the Pharaohs, the Pilates, the Herods, and the
people in the summer houses and the winter houses.” He took “the very book”
that conservatives were using “and turned the guns the other way, as it were,”
arguing that “Good News is only good when it feeds the poor” and that “true
religion” works for “the fraternity of all people.”

Hard times force issues. Seeing
the terrible suffering and contradictions of the Great Depression – children
suffering from rickets, while companies were pouring milk into gutters – was,
for Virginia Durr (photo), seeing “a blinding light, like Saul on the road to
Damascus.” A self-described “conformist, well-off Southern snob,” she
was moved to shame and cajole dairy companies to open their dispensaries to the poor. She
went on to be a pioneer in abolishing the poll tax. Durr describes the
Depression dividing the country into two kinds of people. “The great majority,”
she says, came to think money is “the most important thing in the world. Get
yours. And get it for your children. Nothing else matters.” Anything to keep
“that stark terror” of having nothing from recurring. But, she adds, “there was
a small number of people who felt the whole system was lousy” and “you have to
change it,” to make it “responsive to people’s needs.”

Hard times are not insurmountable.For all those, like myself, who feel a bit
stuck in our tracks, the stories in Hard
Times, taken together, seem to carry a clear message to go ahead and lead
our life. Get on with what's important, get on with living. People figured out how to carry on through all kinds of obstacles in the Depression. Communities literally ran out of money. Goodyear Rubber
and Tire paid its workers in scrip; the local merchants, respectful of the
company’s place in the community, accepted the scrip as payment. People learned
to barter goods and services. While some refused to help others – seeing it as
an affront to the country’s individualist ethic – many helped in smaller ways. Jimmy
McPartland, a jazz musician, describes the musicians’ ethic of giving money to
fellow musicians when they were running low. His peers had little patience with Wall Street big shots
who felt they lost everything when they lost their money. “We used to say to
each other: Are they nuts? What is money? The important thing is life and
living and enjoying life…You’re still livin’, aren’t ya? [You] can start
over.”

***

More about Studs Terkel, including tapes of some of his
interviews, is available through the Chicago History Museum’s
website:

April 21, 2008

By Jon BerryI recently began meditating on the commuter train into
work. It wasn’t
a
practice I sought out. But my work situation changed and I'm working in the city again. Rather than give up starting the day with 15
minutes of silence, I decided to see if meditation is transferrable. It is.

While my preferred meditation spots are still my screen
porch – where, this time of year, I can look out onto tulips, daffodils, and
forsythia, and hear the whistle of birds – or a worn, wooden bench in my
Quaker meeting, the “Hudson Line meditation center” carries its own,
idiosyncratic benefits.

Putting down the newspaper, tuning out the Blackberry, and
turning within, in the midst of a crowded train of rustling newspapers,
tap-tapping keyboards, and muffled conversation, has given me a glimpse into
things that are obvious to an outsider, but are easy to lose sight of when you
do them every day. That I’m in motion.That I’m with other people.
That, when I stop my busy-ness, I can see
and hear more, and feelgrounded -- even when going 60 m.p.h.

I’ve also found anew how porous the boundary is between the
spiritual – that great force that breathes life into us – and the rest of life. In the meanderings of the mind that often accompany the first
phase of meditation, my mind wandered one recent morning to an upcoming business trip to California. I thought
about what I planned to say in the presentations I’d be giving…then about what
was most important to say…then about the
issues my clients are facing…then about the human consequences of their companies' success or failure.

This led to thoughts about the people I’d be seeing…how a
colleague with small children was doing, and a colleague who grew up in China
under Communism and was now here and working for my company…about what a
strange and wonderful world we’re living in today.

I thought about whether I’d be able to visit a
friend whose son has been struggling. I remembered I’d be flying over Indiana, and thought about
whether my 82-year-old Dad would be out on his 50-year-old tractor on his
centuries-old farm – and I smiled. Then I came back to breath, as always, after my thoughts have carried me momentarily away, and recentered into my meditation.

This idea that the spiritual is always hiding in the non-spiritual parts of our lives is what Thich Nhat Hanh is getting
at in the idea that “a dandelion keeps our smile.” The most mundane parts of
life, he says, can bring us into “profound
communion with life.” Hanh, whom I've been reading on the ride in, writes about waiting in the airport and washing the dishes, but it could as easily be the commuter train or a staff meeting.

To Hanh, spiritual practice begins with breathing and
smiling. Like the little revelations that come when we focus consciously on
what we’re doing, it’s a deceptively simple idea. We all breathe. We all value moments of joy. This may seem like Buddhism Lite –
something Hanh gets occasionally dismissed as. But in context of the practice
of engagement in the world that the Vietnamese monk advocates – the “inter-being” that led him
and other monks out of their temples during the Vietnam War to attend to the
victims of bombings and strive for peace – it is the most serious of spiritual work. I love this
quote from his book Peace Is Every Step:

“Our smile affirms our awareness and determination to live
in peace and joy. The source of a true smile is an awakened mind.”

I love the words he chooses – “determination” is such a
fierce word; the linking of smiles with “an awakened mind,” the decision
to live in peace and joy.

If we don’t cultivate a practice of being conscious
of our presence in life, the fact of life is like the wonders of the Hudson River that fly by while our noses are buried in
the newspaper – there, but not there.

***

“Real strength is not in power, money or weapons but in
deep, inner peace.” -- Thich Nhat Hanh

To learn more about Peace Is Every Step, or to buy a copy, please click on this link:

March 10, 2008

A GRIEVING HUSBAND LOOPS THROUGH THE CEMETERY on his daily run to visit his wife’s grave. A grandfather who had a decades-long romance with his wife finds after her death that he can love again. A child decorates a pillow commemorating his father with his dad's beloved silk neckties.

Patricia Donovan-Duff, the founding director of the Bereavement Center of Westchester, in Tuckahoe, NY, has seen people express grief and healing in many ways. Her response is always the same: It’s all OK. There is no one way to mourn.

Since opening in 1995, the Bereavement Center has provided a safe place for thousands of people to talk about the death of a loved one. They come for eight-week groups for children and their families at the Tree House, the center’s children’s program. They come for groups for adults mourning the loss of children, spouses, parents, or siblings, and for individual counseling. The non-profit organization also offers educational and on-site support programs for schools and communities.

Donovan-Duff describes it as sacred work. It is done by a staff of social workers and nurses complemented by 70-plus volunteer facilitators trained by the center. The main requirement, she says, is to be a good listener.

A registered nurse, Donovan-Duff previously was bereavement coordinator for the Phelps Hospital Hospice Program in Sleepy Hollow, NY. She is a founding board member of the National Alliance for Grieving Children, an organization for the more than 300 grief-support programs. The Bereavement Center is a program of Lawrence Community Health Services, which also operates Jansen Hospice & Palliative Care and Lawrence Home Care.

I talked with Donovan-Duff about the grief process – a topic that is still relatively new in our culture – and how she came to this calling.

QUESTION:When the Bereavement Center was started, there weren't many programs like it. Did you have a model?

DONOVAN-DUFF: The Dougy Center, in Portland, Oregon. It was started 25 years ago by a nurse working on a pediatric oncology unit. She noticed that kids would come in saying, “What happened to Joey? He isn’t here.” Nobody would tell them that the child had died. They were afraid the kids would be scared that they would die. But guess what? The kids were already afraid. So, the nurse’s approach was, “Let’s talk with them.”

Q: It’s remarkable that this field has grown from that one center in Portland to more than 300 today.

A: It’s a movement.

Q: What is behind it?

A: Elizabeth Kubler-Ross had a great deal to do with it. In her book On Death and Dying, she wrote about the stages of dying, which she later changed to phases – coming to terms with death is not a linear process. When I started in hospice work 24 years ago, it was very hard to talk with doctors about death and dying. Today people use words like “die,” and talk about the needs of dying people, like the need to not be in pain and not be alone. Hospice opened that conversation up. The grief movement, I think, came out of the hospice movement.

If you talk with someone who went through a death in the family as a child 25-30 years ago, they remember pictures being taken out of the room. The person’s name wasn’t spoken. It was like nothing had happened. We see remnants when our volunteers come in to take training and talk about their experiences. They’ll say nobody ever talked with them. Some weren’t allowed to go to the funeral.

I think what we do is a very big wellness program. The message is that grief is the natural and normal reaction to a death. It’s painful. It can look like chronic depression, but it's something different. Historically the medical world has treated grief with medication or by telling people to exercise. We say, “Let’s talk. Tell us the story.”

“I think what we do is a very big wellness program. The message is that grief is the natural and normal reaction to a death... We say, 'Let’s talk. Tell us the story.'”

Q: What happens when people don’t talk about their grief?

A: I think it resurfaces when the next death happens. The psyche can do an amazing job of repressing. But the memory is still there. I think a lot of mental health issues are due to losses that weren’t attended to.

Q: What are the biggest concerns of people dealing with the death of a loved one?

A: That they’re going crazy. They don’t understand what they’re going through. Grief can be all-encompassing. People think there’s something wrong with them if, five months after a death, they can’t concentrate at their job. But it’s normal. That’s what we say all the time: Everything’s normal. There is no right way or wrong way to grieve. There’s just your way.

Grief can be like a roller coaster. You can feel happy, then sad, then happy, then sad. When you’re going through those feelings, you don’t know they’re normal. You feel you should be getting better: better-better-better. But grief is better, not better, better…then you may hit a bottom. The other metaphor is that grief comes in waves: You turn the corner of the A&P, and burst out crying.

"Grief can be like a roller coaster. You can feel happy, then sad, then happy, then sad....You feel you should be getting better: better-better-better. But grief is better, not better, better…then you may hit a bottom."

People in this work have come to see that there are tasks of grieving. The first task is to accept the reality of what’s happened. I was with a woman yesterday whose husband died on Saturday. She said, “I heard you do bereavement counseling. I think I’m fine, but I might need a group at some point.” She said she hadn’t cried. I asked, “Have you thought that maybe you’re in a little shock, that it hasn’t permeated your body, in every pore, that your husband has died?” And the woman, who was in 60s or 70s, looked at me and said, “Yes, I forget about it sometimes. I woke up this morning, and it took me a minute before I remembered.” The first task is to accept, “OK, it’s happened.”

The second task is to feel the feelings – experience the pain. That’s the hardest part. It’s when you’re missing the person who’s died. It hurts physically. It hurts emotionally. We ask people to tell their story again and again and again. People need to tell the story of someone’s death more than once. The more you tell it, the more real it becomes, and the more you remember. When I had my babies, I needed to tell people the story of everything that happened over and over again. The same thing needs to happen at the end of life when someone dies.

Q: How do you help people access their feelings?

A: We talk about how you are now. What are you going through? What are your worries and concerns? In talking about what’s going on now, feelings come out. The feelings may be good, but they also may be ones you’re afraid to talk about, like guilt or regrets. Sometimes there’s ambivalence. It might not have been a great relationship.

Everybody is different. Sometimes families don’t understand the reactions of different children. One child is crying, the other’s not. We’ll ask, what were they like before? You grieve in character. If you were a crier before, you’ll probably be a crier now.

"Sometimes families don’t understand the reactions of different children. One child is crying, the other’s not. We’ll ask, what were they like before? You grieve in character. If you were a crier before, you’ll probably be a crier now."

The next task is to learn to remember, to commemorate the person who died, in your own way. You might put up a small shrine with pictures and candles. You might have pictures next to your bed. You might go to the cemetery. You might wear a heart necklace with with a photo of the person. Every way is OK.

One of the beauties of groups is that they normalize. Support groups are wonderful that way. People talk to other people and realize, “I’m not the only one who hasn’t given the clothing away, and it’s been two years.” “I’m not the only one who goes to the cemetery every day.”

In a group I ran years ago, there was a young widower with little children. Midway through the eight-week group, he felt safe enough to share how he remembered his wife. He said, “I’m a runner, and the cemetery is in my town. Every morning, I run, and I go to the cemetery, and I lie down on her grave.” There was quiet in the room. He looked around the group. He knew he was revealing something that could go either way. Were people going to say he was crazy? And the group said, “Oh, that’s so wonderful.” He had such a sense of relief.

When somebody dies, there’s a real fear that you’re going to forget them. You’re going to forget their voice, what they look like. In the beginning, when someone has just died, you think, “Where the hell are you? Where did you go?” Even if you believe in heaven, you ask, “Where are you?” One of the goals in grieving is to bring the memory of the person inside your heart. In the beginning the memory’s too painful – you can’t bring that person inside you forever yet. But eventually, they’re just with you.

"When somebody dies, there’s a real fear that you’re going to forget them. You’re going to forget their voice, what they look like. In the beginning, when someone has just died, you think, 'Where the hell are you? Where did you go?'... One of the goals in grieving is to bring the memory of the person inside your heart."

Q: We live in a culture that goes so fast. How do you help people slow down and hear what’s going on inside them?

A: Hopefully they have a certain experience in the group or in individual counseling – a pause that happens when people feel someone is truly listening to them. People going through grief need to surround themselves with people who will listen and be with them. There are a lot of casualties after a death – friends who are not there for you, family members who don’t understand. We ask people who are grieving, “What do you need?” “I need someone to just listen and not tell me what to do or what to feel.” “OK, find that person in the next week. Who can do that for you? That’s a need you have.” “Well, maybe my friend Ann. She’s a good listener.”

We say this to kids, too. In our society, adults are not good at listening to sad stories, especially from kids. They don’t want to see sad kids. They want you to be better. They want you to be fixed. People are fine for a little bit, then they say, “OK, we want the old Patty back now.” We tell people to give somebody the job to be your special friend, who you can call up and say, “I just need to cry. I need to remember. Would you let me do that?”

A lot of this is common sense. But I think in many ways, we as a society have lost our connection with our instincts. We don’t trust ourselves. We tell people, “Trust your gut that you know what you need. If you need to stay home from work one day because you just need to cry or go to the cemetery, do that. It’s OK.” It’s like taking an antibiotic. Attend to your wound. This doesn’t get better by itself. It doesn’t get better with time. It’s what you do with that time.

"We tell people, 'Trust your gut that you know what you need. If you need to stay home from work one day because you just need to cry or go to the cemetery, do that. It’s OK.'...Attend to your wound. This doesn’t get better by itself. It doesn’t get better with time. It’s what you do with that time."

The next task is to start to reinvest in the world. The focus is less on the person who died and more on you. You learn who you are without this person who died. People are different after a profound death. It changes them. They can become better people. They can learn through that process and grow.

Q: Are there things that people have said, who have come out the other side of mourning, that have stuck with you?

A: There was one wonderful man who came in after his wife died. They had an amazingly close, storybook relationship. He was grieving her so intensely. He really wanted to die some days. He wasn’t going to do anything with that feeling – he had grandchildren – but that’s how bad his pain was. He went to the cemetery every single day. I never would have imagined that he would have a relationship with another woman, but, today, he does. He’s never going to marry her. His wife was his one true love. In his wildest dreams, he probably never would have envisioned that he would be enjoying life again. He still misses his wife, and always will. But he’s different now.

We’ve had people who have come back to volunteer at the center because they want to give back. I’m in the middle of a volunteer training right now. It’s amazing. The world just stops: We’re talking about death, dying and grief. There’s such silence and presence.

Our goal is to teach volunteers how to be present. One of the nights of the training is about sharing a loss that you’ve had. We do a guided meditation, then divide into groups of two. For half an hour, the two people tell their story to each other. We then come back together and talk about what it’s like to have somebody really listen to us. Some people have never experienced anything like it. Our world today is so much about phones and computers and multitasking, we’ve forgotten how to be present for someone. The biggest gift you can give anybody is to let them know that you hear what they’re saying.

"Our goal is to teach volunteers how to be present.... The biggest gift you can give anybody is to let them know that you hear what they’re saying.

Q: What kinds of rituals do you use to help clients open up?

A: Simple rituals. At the beginning of every session, people introduce themselves saying, “Hi, my name is ___, and my mom died.” It’s a ritual of articulating the death and accepting the reality. For children, this can be really hard. They may not want to say it. They can pass. There’s also a checking-in about how the week has been.

Our rituals are more focused at the end of the group. One of our goals in these eight-week groups is teaching them all, children through adults, how to deal with loss. Hopefully we are planting seeds that they can use in the future.

We have a goodbye ritual the last night. In the adult group, it might be having stones on a plate. You take a stone, hold it, and say a wish for yourself and a wish for the group. The stone will be passed around, and everyone will touch it and bring it back. It’s a way of saying goodbye to each other.

In the Tree House, with the kids, we have a ritual at the end called the Memory Pillows. We start with blank canvas pillow cases. We put pictures of the person who died on the pillow case. For the last three weeks, the kids decorate the pillow cases in their own individual way. They draw pictures. They write letters to put inside the pillow. One little boy decorated his with his dad’s neckties; the dad had a magnificent collection of silk ties. Then we put pillows in and close them up. On the last night, we put up a painting of a tree on a big drop cloth. We’ll remember each person who died. The family will come up and hang their pillow on the tree. By the end we have a huge mural. In a very visual way, the kids see that they’re not the only one going through the death of a loved one. They see they’re all different and have done this work in different ways, and it’s all right. It’s good to remember, any way you want to remember.

"In a very visual way, the kids see that they’re not the only one going through the death of a loved one. They see they’re all different and have done this work in different ways."

Q: In what ways is this spiritual work?

A: It connects human beings on such a very, very basic level. I consider that sacred work. I think that’s what this world is about, being present and connecting with people.

Q: How did you get into this field?

A: I became a nurse because I wanted to help people.

Q: When did you first feel that?

A: As a kid. I was raised Catholic. Along with the guilt – which everyone talks about – being raised Catholic made me want to be a better person. I always knew I’d be in a helping profession. I wanted to be a nurse all through high school. I liked healing, the hospitals, the white uniforms. I loved being in the middle of crisis and being with people.

When I went to college, I majored in nursing. They were just starting nursing degrees. I discovered psychiatric nursing, and thought, “Whoa, this is great.” I loved it. I was drawn to it.

I think I was also drawn to death. I was scared of death when I was young. There were no big deaths in my family. But my best friend died when I was six. She and I had measles at the same time. This was before the vaccine. I recovered, but she died. I have this memory of being in a dark room – when you had measles they kept you in a dark room – and emerging and asking, “Where’s Mary Elizabeth?” “Oh, she died.” I didn’t go to the church for the service.

I’ve always been the kind of person that, when I’m afraid of something, I don’t run away from it. I go to it. I want to figure it out, so I won’t be so afraid of it. When I graduated from college, before becoming a psychiatric nurse, I worked for a year on an oncology ward of a hospital. Patients died every day, alone, in pain, in a very sterile setting. I remember going into the med room and just crying.

"I’ve always been the kind of person that, when I’m afraid of something, I don’t run away from it. I go to it. I want to figure it out..."

Q: Did you think you’d wind up where you are now?

A: No. Never. It’s been a process. Two big things that I’ve learned in the work that I’ve been doing the past 12 years – and I’m a different person because of it, I believe that – are the value of being totally present to the moment and that life is a process. Grief is a process, and life is a process.

In a way, I feel everything has led me to this. I was a psychiatric nurse for years. One day, when I was working at St. Josephs Hospital in Yonkers, I was having a conversation with the social worker, and he said, “You know, my wife’s starting a hospice program at Phelps Hospital. Are you interested in a job there? They need a nurse.” It was pure coincidence. That year on the oncology ward was so horrible. Part of me thought I would go back to that and try to help make it better.

I interviewed and everything fell into place. It was the infancy of hospice. It was all very grassroots. It was wonderful. We relied on volunteers. We had a chaplain. We brought in visiting nurses. I learned how to work with volunteers. I learned how to work on an interdisciplinary team. It taught me a lot about starting a program. I took a break at one point to spend more time at home, but continued to work with the hospice. Then Phelps asked me back to start a bereavement program to support families of hospice patients.

We networked with other bereavement programs. One day I went to a talk at Jansen Memorial Hospice, and the chaplain approached me and asked, would you like to be a director of a new program for children and adults? They saw a need to bring bereavement work not just to people with loved ones going through hospice, but to the community at large. They felt there was a lot of unattended-to grief in the community. I thought about it long and hard. I never aspired to be a director of a non-profit, with the fund-raising and administration. But I took the job. It’s been an incredible growth process to build something from nothing.

Q: Do you have things you that you do for yourself spiritually?

A: I do yoga. Not as much as I want to, but I love it. When I get up in the morning, I have a semi-meditation to try to center myself. I get my cup of coffee and sit in my living room and try to be still for five or 10 minutes.

Q: And you get spiritual experiences in your work.

A: Absolutely. Usually every day there’s a moment – we call them moments – when we’re working with people, or working with volunteers, and you make a connection. It’s a gift.

Q: Has this work changed your relationship with death?

A: In a way, I think I’ve befriended it. I don’t want to die, but I now know I don’t have to die in pain, that I don’t have to die alone, and that millions of people have been through it. We don’t know what is on the other side, but I have faith that there is something.

Q: How do you avoid burnout?

A: I try to keep a sense of balance in my life. A stable home life has helped me a lot. It helps me turn work off when I leave here. The times that are hard are when there’s not balance. Something is happening at home and my equilibrium is off.

I have worked with incredible, amazing people with sad, sad stories. But I find that when I’m right there with them, things come into focus. It becomes clear that what a grieving person needs is someone to just sit with them and listen to them. What we do is very simple. We’re not trying to fix people. We don’t have the pressure of trying to make things better. We offer our presence. We listen and validate. We try to help people not feel so alone; there’s a healing when that happens.

"What we do is very simple. We’re not trying to fix people. We don’t have the pressure of trying to make things better. We offer our presence. We listen and validate. We try to help people not feel so alone; there’s a healing when that happens."

I don’t think everybody can do this work, just like not everybody can be a social worker or a doctor or nurse. But those people who can do it, and do it for a long time, can have a very full life. This is work that makes you pause and appreciate what’s important. The best part is to see someone when they are so fragile and so raw, and then see them a year later and they are so different. That’s why I don’t get burned out. I see the resilience of life, that people do go on.

That’s I.T.

For more on the Bereavement Center of Westchester, including programs, information on how to make a donation to the center, and links to more information on grieving, please visit:www.thebereavementcenter.org

February 18, 2008

By Jon BerryIN THE 1950s, LOU CASSOTTA DECIDED TO LEAVE HIS JOB
as an
electrical engineer and become a psychologist. He was accepted into New York
University’s Ph.D. program, and began taking
classes at night as a part-time student, continuing to work during the day. He
knew at some point he’d have a problem: When he started his internship, he’d
have to give up his day job. His income, in turn, would drop precipitously. But
he resolved to deal with that day when it came.

“I had a feeling that, if you commit yourself to something,
and you’re really open, things happen that you don’t expect,” recalls Lou (pictured above).

And they did. One night, a friend invited him over to see
her new prized possession – a radio tape recorder that she’d won in a contest.
To demonstrate, she put on a tape
she’d made of her therapist talking about a
research project involving the new technology of computers. As Lou listened, a light
bulb went off in his head: “I’m an
engineer and a psychology student. I know computers.
That guy’s got to want me.” He wrote a letter, the man wrote back, and within a
few months, Lou was offered a position on the project. The flexible hours
enabled him to go to school full-time. The project kept him on salary while he
was on his internship. The work became the subject of his thesis.

Coincidences like Lou’s are rare gifts. But many of us have had
moments when, in a term from early Quakers, “way opens.” A door appears that we
weren’t aware of. Such moments of recognition have been a theme in my
interviews so far in Insight Trails interviews.
Some of the stories sound like examples of synchronicity, Jung’s “meaningful coincidence.” But
many are simply realizations that opportunity has knocked – moments of
inspiration. Joe Kelly’s wife, Nancy Gruver, had such a moment when the idea
for New Moon magazine sprang fully
formed into her mind. George Russell had a more gradual realization of his
skills as a healer when his fellow dancers started asking him to do bodywork on
them, then making appointments, then giving him money.

In an ideal world, opportunities would come to us in the
form of burning bushes – preferably, a burning bush that talks to us. In their
absence, we must develop a practice of learning to recognize opportunity.

A lot comes down to two ideas that Lou Cassotta intuited as a young man: commitment and openness.

A lot, I think, comes down to two ideas that Lou intuited as
a young man:
commitment and openness. “If you make a
bold move, it changes
your life,” says Lou. “It changes your view. Things come up that you can’t foresee.” Lou, a golfer (photo), compares the phenomenon to athletes who are in “the zone”: Time slows down (an approaching baseball) so that what to do becomes clear. The athlete is
simultaneously focused (“hit the ball”) and open to input that will help
reach the goal (“the rotation of the seams means…curve ball”).

To be open, we need to be able to listen. A conflict resolution manual published
by the Mennonites that I read years ago said something that has always stayed with me. Listening, the book said, is more than a
tool to help someone feel heard. It’s “opening ourselves to the possibility of
being changed.” Meditation is, essentially, deep, transformative listening (a
meditation exercise on attuning ourselves to our environment follows this
essay).

Commitment to a cause can change those around us, too. Ellen
Baker’s friends helped her set up her bookkeeping business, offering
encouragement, creating ads, designing her business
cards, even bringing her clients. Kristen Laine says people around her took her more seriously after she
began to thinking of herself as a writer. “You recognize it in someone,” says Kristen. “I think something actually, physically changes in people, in how they
hold themselves, when they’re committed to a path.”

My mom, I think, got the gist of it in one of her favorite sayings: “You make the bed you lay in.”

Mom Was Right.Those
who have read or seen the New Age best-seller The Secret might call “opportunity knocks” moments examples of the
law of attraction – you attract what you think. But the idea is much older and
more widespread. It’s the Hindu concept of karma – our actions create our fate.
It’s in the phrase Ellen Baker heard in 12-step meetings: “You get back what
you put out.” A lot of practical, common-sense advice passed down from
generation to generation is about the messages we send to the world.

My mom, I think, got the gist of it in one of her favorite sayings: “You make the bed you lay in.” As a kid, I used to chafe at the notion: What about all
the children born into poverty? Did they make that bed? But my parents, who
grew up in the Great Depression, saw a gritty truth in it and a corollary saying my Mom also invoked, “You make your heaven
and hell on earth.” To them, being focused,
resourceful, and mindful of others – “keep your eye on the ball,” “make hay
while the sun shines,” and remember the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you
would
have them do unto you”), in other sayings of their day – increase
your chances of getting the life you want. If we want a meaningful life, we
need to put our thoughts and actions into creating a meaningful life.

My dad’s parents are legendary in our family for their
resourcefulness. Grandpa Don learned to repair his farm
equipment; this, in turn, got him work repairing machines in the factories in
town. When rural electrification
came, he wired many of the farms in the area. He
knew plumbing, built houses, and was barber to local kids. My grandpa and
Grandma Clara, with their four sons, raised much of their own food. They cured
their own ham.

Their ingenuity was in service of what meant most to them:
their family and farm.
At a
time when many Americans lost their farms, my
grandparents held onto theirs – “the little place,” as they called it – throughout the Depression. When prosperity returned in the 1950s, they parlayed it into a larger farm on better
ground up the road. That farm remains in our family (photos). Whether my
grandparents “attracted” abundance, or were following a maxim of their day
(“God helps those who help themselves”) is, to me, semantics. They were
committed and open to what life presented.

That’s I.T.

“5-4-3-2-1 meditation.” This is a great exercise for tuning
in and opening up to the world around us. I learned it in a workshop led by Arizona
psychologist John Dore. Start by closing your eyes in meditation. Keep them
closed for several minutes. When you open your eyes, make a mental list of five
things you see; five things you hear; and five things you’re feeling. Then
close your eyes for several minutes; open them, and tick off four things you
see; four things you hear; and four things you’re feeling. Close your eyes and
repeat the exercise for three things you see, hear, and feel; then two;
then one. I’ve tried this meditation to start the day, and before
writing, speeches, and important meetings – and think I’ve just tapped the
surface of its potential.

To read the following Insight
Trails interviews, click on the links below:

January 21, 2008

By Jon BerryWHEN I WAS A YOUNG, ASPIRING NEWSPAPER REPORTER, a gruff,
old journalist
taught me something I never forgot. It wasn’t about writing a
lede, developing sources,
or other tools of the trade. It was the importance of
cultivating silence.

Whenever he
hit a wall in a story or in life, the journalist went off to a corner of his
house where he wouldn’t be disturbed, lit a candle, and spent a half-hour
in
complete quiet. He always came back, he said, with a new perspective.

A business
executive once expressed the same idea in a different way to a friend of mine.
“Everyone,” he said, “needs some ceiling time.” He meant that everyone, even
busy executives, needs time to meditate. His own daily meditation was to gaze up
at the ceiling – the one space in his office that didn’t carry a reminder of
work.

Silence can
be uncomfortable. We’ve all had the experience of being asked to observe a
moment of silence in a ballgame, dinner, or meeting, when the leader leaps
onto the next sentence before the word “silence” has barely been said. We live
in a culture of taking action. Slowing down is disruptive. It’s disturbing.

And it
leads to good things. I see it in the people I’ve interviewed so far for Insight Trails. They practice it in
different ways – walks in the woods, meditation, prayer,
quieting down in
religious or spiritual setting. But all have silence as part of their life.

I
experience the power of cultivating silence in the spiritual communities that I’m
part of. In the Quaker meeting I go to on Sunday mornings, the hour of silence
yields insights, connections, and a sense of calm unlike anything in my
day-to-day life.

I’ve opened
meetings in non-spiritual settings – including workplaces – with a brief
silence. Sometimes it’s a minute. Mostly it’s just one or two full, deep
breaths. I don’t identify the request as spiritual as such – saying instead
something like, “first, let’s take a deep breath and think about what we want
from this meeting…” This moment of reflection can do wonders for focusing the
group’s attention.

Early
Quakers identified the experience of discomfort that we have in silence as the
first step in spiritual awakening. They believed that we all have within us an
“Inward Light” that impels us toward truth, including uncomfortable truths. The
experience brings us fresh points of view and deeper perspectives – in Friends’
terms, closer to God. Within it is the potential to transform, refresh, and heal.

How does
one begin? Recent readings have deepened my appreciation of the process of Quaker
silence. Taking these books and pamphlets together, certain themes come
through:

Center Down. This old Quaker
term literally means what it says. Quaker worship
begins with turning inward,
to our center, and focusing down, to get out of our heads. The goal, says J.
Brant Bill in Holy Silence, a good,
book-length primer on Quaker worship, is to “create a space for God to work
within us.” It’s not easy. Cares of the week bubble up. Sounds crowd in –
someone coughing, cars going by, children whispering. Some Friends respond by
returning to centering down. Others turn the disruptions into prayer – reminders
to pray for people’s health, safe travels, and children – “pray the
distractions directly into the prayer,” as Douglas Steere puts it in his
pamphlet Friends and Worship.

Deeper Silence. At a certain
point, the busyness gives way to a deeper quiet. Bill puts it nicely. Having
“cast off from the shore” and made our way “around the edge of the spiritual
sea,” we are drawn to “launch out to the depths,” to a place that is “deeper
spiritually” and “higher emotionally” than “any place we normally live.” The
busyness of the first phase of centering drifts away. It’s as if we’ve stepped
outside time.

Opening up. In this deeper
silence, things happen. Life opens up. The controls that we clamp onto
day-to-day life – that often keep us from experiencing life – fade away. Some
people experience a welling up of gratitude that isn’t accessible to them in
everyday experience, from the divine mystery of life to simple beauties around
them – birds at the birdfeeder, children on the playground, bicyclists going
by.

Answers. Early Quakers found
another, important thing occurred in this deeper state: Answers came to them.
Many times they were elusive – an image, a feeling, or a snippet of a phrase.
But they resonated as true.

Rex Ambler,
who recreated the process of early Friends’ worship experience in his
brief
book Light to Live by, writes about the
words “be real” coming “out of the blue” to him while meditating on a troubled
relationship. He “understood immediately,” he writes, that he had “been acting
a part” in his life, with the result that he didn’t know himself or how to be
in a relationship. It would take courage and acceptance, but – if he could be
true to himself – he had a way through his problem.

This notion
of letting in answers separates the
Quakers from other kinds of meditation that emphasize continual letting go. The concept has been
integrated into therapeutic practice. “Focusing,” a six-step technique developed by Eugene Gendlin,
a psychologist who attended Quaker meetings as a child, is premised on the idea
that truth resides in each of us (as opposed to an external authority); that
this truth can be experienced; and that it often lies deeper than words or
other symbolic expressions. Our inner truths often have corollaries in our
bodies – “felt senses” in the chest, gut, or elsewhere. Focusing doesn’t
solve the problem. But, in the words of one writer, it can lead to “the
beginnings of clarity about changes I need to make in my life.”

These
moments of clarity can also be accompanied by physical effects – sighs, tears, deep
feelings of relief. I’ve seen all of these, as well, in Friends’ Meetings for
Worship.

Transformation. Cultivating a
practice of sailing into the deep waters of silence, and listening to the
deeper truths available there, can be risky business. Early Friends describe
being “ripped apart” by the experience. But they also found that opening
themselves up in silence changed them in powerful ways. Exposing the old,
uncomfortable truths, says Ambler, can lead to “the birth of a new, truer
self.”

This
transformation can spur further changes. It sends us back into the world with a
new energy. It’s the underlying idea, I believe, in the often-quoted line from
William Penn (founder of Pennsylvania)
that “true goodliness does not turn men out of the world, but enables them to
live better in it and excites their endeavors to mend it.” It keeps us focused
on the big picture and big questions, forcing us, as Bill says, to ask “what
does God want?” rather than “our usual ‘what do I want?’” It helps us be with
others; a deep, shared silence can be more helpful than any words to a friend
in need of comfort. It gives us “strength and power to allay all storms and
tempests,” in the words of George Fox, the early leader of Quakerism. Done
communally, as in Friends Meetings, it can harmonize us with those around us and open us to wisdom that
others possess. Fox counseled his followers to always “carry around some quiet
inside thee.”

Early
Friends considered silence to be a direct path to God, the Christ Within. This
was a radical idea in its time. Giving up dependence on doctrines, rituals,
preachers, and the other accoutrements of the church, and turning inward to
find the Eternal, put the Quakers at odds with the establishment.

Silence
remains a radical idea today. In our culture of Blackberries, cell phones, the
Internet, high-definition televisions, and continual bombardment of advertising,
cultivating silence – as opposed to consuming products – is a radical idea. But
it can connect us to – and keep us on – the path we’re supposed to be on.

Rex Ambler’s great little book Light to Live by chronicles Ambler’s study of early Friends’
approach and step-by-step distillation of it for individual and group
meditations. To purchase a copy, click
here:http://www.quakerbooks.org/search

Friends Journal is
an excellent resource for learning more about contemporary Quakerism (full
disclosure: I serve on the board of this publication, in addition to being a
big fan of it.):http://www.friendsjournal.org/

The image of the Quaker meetinghouse is of Live Oaks Meeting in Houston, Tx. The meeting room features a "skyspace" ceiling window that opens to the sky. For more, see: http://www.friendshouston.org/

January 06, 2008

MAHATMA GANDHI'S SECRETARY WAS ONCE ASKED HOW Gandhi
could
speak so profoundly, for so long, without preparation, prompting, or notes.
“What Gandhi thinks, what he feels, what he says, and what he does are all the
same,” the secretary replied. “You and I, we think one thing, feel another, say
a third, and do a fourth, so we need notes and files to keep track.”

We can’t all be Gandhi. But we can strive to be authentic –
the same person in what we think, feel, say, and do.

I was reminded of this insight when I interviewed Ellen
Baker. Ellen has multiple spiritual outlets. With her husband, James Sweeney,
and four other parishioners, she recently started a church. The congregation,
part of a movement breaking away from the Roman Catholic Church, meets every
Saturday evening in their home in suburban New York.

With James, Ellen is studying Buddhism through a three-year
program at a Buddhist monastery in upstate New York. She also is a lay associate of an
order of Catholic nuns, and has participated in Catholic ministries. She is
active in Al-Anon, the 12-step program for family and friends of alcoholics.
Ellen views her work as a bookkeeper – she has had an independent practice for
17 years – as an expression of her spirituality as well.

Her beliefs have sometimes led to confrontations. Her decision
to leave the Roman Catholic Church is one example. She once was fired from a
job after standing up for what she believed.

Listening to Ellen talk, the different aspects of her life are
reflections of one of the core truths she’s learned – to “to be honest and who
you are.”

I talked with Ellen about her spiritual pursuits, her work,
and her journey.

QUESTION: You’re starting a church. Can you tell me about it?

ELLEN BAKER: It’s a brand-new, fledgling parish, and it’s
exciting. It’s called the Church for All People. And it is. Nobody’s excluded.
Women can be ordained. Gays can get married. Those are two of the big issues we’ve
had with the Roman Catholic Church.

It’s part of the Catholic Apostolic Church in North America (CACINA),
which is a movement that started back in the 1940s with priests who left the
Roman Catholic Church and started a Vatican-free Catholic Church.

Right now we have six parishioners. The priest who started
our mother church in Brooklyn comes up on
Saturdays for the services.

"It’s called the Church for All People. And it is. Nobody’s excluded.
Women can be ordained. Gays can get married."

Q: How is it exciting?

A: It’s like we’re astronauts going to visit another
planet. If you’re a Catholic, you live your life so locked into tradition. Giving
it up is like giving up my citizenship. But at the same time, my heart hasn’t
been fully in it.

Both James and I were out of the church for decades. When we
returned, there were always questions in the back of our minds. The Catholic
Church’s sex scandal put it over the edge. It was a struggle every time we went
to church. We felt like we were wearing two faces. We loved the people and
loved our ministries. But when it came to the priests and the hierarchy of the
church, we felt like hypocrites. We went through a lot of struggle and
discernment, and finally decided we couldn’t do it anymore.

Q: How is the new church different?

A: The laity are involved in all the decisions. We
decide the prayers. We take turns being the Eucharistic Minister. It’s what I
think of the Catholic Church being like in the early days, when it was a new
community, everybody was on equal footing, and services were held in people’s homes.
It feels much more natural.

“It’s what I think of the Catholic Church being like
in the early days, when it was a new community, everybody was on equal footing,
and services were held in people’s homes.”

I feel like I’m in the place where I’m supposed to be. On
Christmas morning, Joe, our priest [the Rev. Joseph Diele, a priest in the
Roman Catholic Church for two decades before starting the Church for All
People], did a special Liturgy. He asked us where we see God working in our
lives. Almost everybody touched on this new community. We didn’t know at first
what it would be about. But it’s become a big impetus for all of us. It was a
leap of faith. I feel I’m in a community that is all in this together, trusting
its instincts and moving forward.

Every morning during the week, we have a conference call. We
get on the phone at a quarter to seven, for five to ten minutes. One person
opens it with a prayer for the day. I’m absolutely amazed by what they say.
They’re beautiful prayers. Then we have petitions where we pray for specific
things, like people who are sick. Then we say the Lord’s Prayer and a short
closing. I like it a lot.

Q: What are your relationships like in your former
parish?

A: It’s been fine. A number of people feel the same
way, but can’t bring themselves to move. They have been in the church all of
their adult lives. They cling to the belief that the church is the people, and
that it’s important to stay in there and fight. I admire that. I really do. But
I’m not that kind of person. I need to get something out of this while I’m
here. I’m not here to fight for what’s going to happen in 50 years.

Q: How does the Buddhist study factor in?

A: There are so many similarities between Buddhism and
Christianity. Many times what we talked about on Saturday morning in the
Buddhism classes turns out to be what comes up that night in the Scripture
readings.

Q: Which similarities strike you most?

A: The obvious one is the message. Christ’s message is
peace, compassion, and loving your neighbor. That’s basically the Buddha’s
message, too – peace, compassion, loving-kindness, no killing, no violence. The
life of the Buddha and the life of Jesus have a lot of similarities. Many of
the stories in the sacred texts are also similar.

I had always had a theory that Jesus was the Western Buddha.
I could never buy that God would send his Son down to one small group of people
and say this is just for you and nobody else. To see this happening, 500 years
apart, on two sides of the world, makes a lot more sense to me.

A: 12-step is the umbrella over all my spirituality.
Without Al-Anon, I never would have discovered my spirituality. It’s where I
learned to have a relationship with my Higher Power, and where I learned to see
that Higher Power working in my life. It helped me learn to let go of outcomes
and “what if’s.” My other activities are, in a sense, the natural consequence
of the awakening I’ve had in Al-Anon. It made me want to connect with
like-minded people, learn more, and keep growing.

Q: Going back to when you were a kid, did you always
have a large spiritual component in your life?

A: Nothing. We were strict Roman Catholics. But it was
all about religion and nothing about spirituality. It was pray, pay, and obey:
Do the prayers they tell you to do, pay your donation every Sunday, and do
whatever they tell you. I went to Catholic school all the way, right through college.
Mass every Sunday. Confession. Sacraments. First Communion. Confirmation. But I
never really got it. I didn’t feel anything when I was in church.

“It was all about
religion and nothing about spirituality. It was pray, pay, and obey: Do the
prayers they tell you to do, pay your donation every Sunday, and do whatever
they tell you.”

Q: You wound up on Wall Street. How did that happen?

A: Really, by default. I started college at Elizabeth Seton College in Yonkers,
then transferred to Catholic University in Washington.
But I dropped out at the end of my junior year. I came back to New York and got a job
as a secretary.

My first job was for the national headquarters of the Girl
Scouts. I really liked it. I wanted to work in something that was intrinsically
good. I was a hippie, basically.
I graduated from high school in 1969. Peace,
love, justice and non-violence were definitely part of my life.

But working for a nonprofit, I wasn’t making a lot of money.
Eventually money won out, and I got a job as a secretary for a big Wall Street
firm. I worked five years at that firm, then got a job at another Wall Street
firm. I started out working for the chairman of the board. I was at the top of
the level of being a secretary.

But the whole time I was on Wall Street, I was bored with
the business. I didn’t think I could do anything but type and take shorthand. I
didn’t really understand the financial world. I was never out to make a lot of
money. Everybody around me was excited about what they were doing. I thought
there was something wrong with me. My self-esteem was so low that I felt I
couldn’t ask anybody for help. I thought they’d fire me.

Q: When you’re in that type of a hole, it’s hard to
work your way out.

A: Plus I was married to an alcoholic. I just thought
there was something wrong with me. My husband at the time was in the movie
industry, and he got a job in Hollywood.
So we picked up and relocated. I was starting to get “sick and tired of being
sick and tired,” as people say in Al-Anon. But I went. To some extent, I think
I saw it as a chance to break free of my old life and get out of the Wall
Street scene.

We lived in California 14-15 months. I started to make my own friends. I also discovered Taoism. I
started having acupuncture. My acupuncturist’s father was a Taoist master. I
started reading about Taoism. I didn’t understand any of it but there was
something about it that so wonderful and so peaceful. I didn’t know what it was,
but I knew it was something I wanted.

“I started reading about Taoism. I didn’t understand
any of it but there was something about it that so wonderful and so peaceful... I knew it was something I wanted.”

Q: What happened to change things?

A: My husband lost his job and decided to go back to New York. His addictions
were getting worse. In the back of my mind, I was starting to give up on the
marriage. I came close to saying go back without me, but I felt I couldn’t give
up that easily. We’d been married almost 10 years. I had to give it another
shot. So I went back with him.

The marriage continued to disintegrate. I got a job through
a mutual friend working for an interior designer. He was automating his office,
putting it all on computer. I could wear my jeans to work, and that really
appealed to me. (It still does!) One of the areas I had to automate was the accounting
department. I began to see how accounting worked. I realized I was good at it,
and liked it. I like everything in neat little piles and wrapped up nicely.
That’s my personality.

I went to a work for a friend of mine who was starting a
business. She asked me if I could come in a couple days a week to pay the bills
and reconcile the bank statement. That morphed into a full-time job. By then,
my husband and I had separated. I wound up doing all the
finance and administration for her business. I started going back to school,
and took accounting classes to supplement what I didn’t know.

She had a lot of freelancers working for her – designers,
writers. They really liked me. I would pay their bills the same week they would
turn them in.

I guess this is where some of the spirituality started. Most
bills we put on a 30-day rotation. But I knew these people. This was their
bread and butter. I wasn’t going to make them wait 30 days.

Q: What was spiritual about that?

A: You don’t withhold somebody’s money from them. To
me, that’s part of my spirituality. It’s the right thing to do.

“You don’t withhold somebody’s money from them. To
me, that’s part of my spirituality. It’s the right thing to do.”

Q: When did your spiritual shift began?

A: It really started when I went into Al-Anon. My
husband and I had split up and I was having a really hard time with my mother.
A couple people had suggested I go to Al-Anon. I had the classic response: “What
do I need to go for? I’m not the one who’s sick.” But they continued to suggest
it, so I went.

About the same time, I started my bookkeeping business. The
writers and designers I was working with started coming to me with their
questions about money. They’d come into my office with a 1099 and say, can you
help me out? I’d explain it, and they’d say, thank you so much for taking the
time to tell me this stuff. They started telling me, “You should hang out your own
shingle.” Things were getting bad in my job. I wasn’t happy there anymore. So I
decided to leave. They helped me. One designed my business card. One helped me
write ads to put into trade magazines. Through them, I started to get clients.

Q: Do you think there’s a connection between your
starting to go to Al-Anon and starting your own company in the same period?

A: When the student is ready, the teacher appears. When
I went to Al-Anon, the thing that first struck me was to hear people talk about
how God was working in their life. I didn’t see those things happening to me. I
was scared. I was single. My marriage was over. I was starting my own business.
I had a mortgage to pay. I had a co-op. But I was listening. I began to realize
that if things were going to change, it had to start with me. The first three
steps in 12-step programs talk about relying on God and turning your will over.
I realized I really didn’t have much choice. I had to do it.

I started praying again. But it was totally different from
when I was young. I didn’t say a Hail Mary. I basically just talked to God:
“Show me what to do here. Help me out. Am I doing the right thing?” Going back
to the rooms, week after week – I was going to three meetings a week,
consistently, for the first five years I was in program – bit by bit, I started
seeing things working in my life.

“I was scared. I was single. My marriage was over. I
was starting my own business. I had a mortgage to pay. I had a co-op. But I was
listening. I began to realize that if things were going to change, it had to
start with me.”

Q: Do you remember an a-ha moment?

A: I was still working three days a week at the company
while starting my business. I was asked to do something I wasn’t comfortable
with. I didn’t think it was ethical. I called a friend who was an accountant,
and he said, don’t do it. It was Friday. I left a note on my boss’ desk, saying
I can’t do this. When I came back the next week, I was fired. All of a sudden a
lot of my income was gone. I never saw it coming. I had no idea. That was a
real a-ha!

I was starting to integrate what I was hearing in Al-Anon –
say what you mean and mean what you say. Don’t play games. Do the right thing. I
did it, and, whoa, I got fired.

I realized the power of being ethical in business. It was
scary. But it was also kind of cool. I was relieved to be out of there. In Al-Anon, you start learning to throw off all the lies and all the trappings, and
to be honest and be who you are. That was the beginning of it, and felt good.

“I realized the power of being ethical in business.
It was scary. But it was also kind of cool. I was relieved to be out of there.
In Al Anon, you start learning to throw off all the lies and all the trappings,
and to be honest and be who you are.”

Q: People could go several ways in that situation.
You could have said, “I did the right thing and it got me fired. I won’t do that again.”

A: That never occurred to me. I never questioned
whether I was doing the right thing. There was one thing I learned from my
mother. She never let anyone push her around. From a very early age, I would
never let anyone push me around.

There had been another, earlier incident. When I was on Wall
Street, I was asked to lie to my boss by one of his underlings. There was a big
political mess going on in my company at the time. I refused to do it. These corporate
types just went crazy. They couldn’t believe this secretary wouldn’t do this. I
was completely alienated and ostracized by the muckety-mucks.

Q: What was the difference between the two events?

A: The first time, the fact they asked me to do it just
frightened me. I thought, “Oh my God, I’m in one those Michael Douglas movies
about the Wall Street tycoon who’s trying to get everybody do something
illegal.” I had worked in Wall Street firms at the time when they were having
major scandals. I remember sitting next to a guy who was on the front page of
the paper the next day being taken out in handcuffs. I had seen that kind of stuff
happen, but I had never been asked to do anything.

Q: How did having a spiritual community make it
different the second time?

A: I wasn’t alone. I had a community, a group of people
who understood me. I could go to an Al-Anon meeting the next day and talk about
it. I had people who would support me. The first time, I didn’t have that. I couldn’t
go to anybody in the company and tell them. I didn’t have a 12-step group. I
could tell my husband, and he was sympathetic. He said you did the right thing.
But that was it.

Q: You’ve touched a number of times on doing the
right thing. How do you know what the right thing to do is?

A: I ask what my gut tells me. I also ask the Christian
question, what would Jesus do? It’s a cliché, but it works. And I try to think
about what I’m putting out. It’s a concept I learned early on in the 12-step
program: You get back what you put out. It’s the idea of karma. If I do the wrong
thing, it will come back to haunt me, in my soul.

“You get back what you put out. It’s the idea of
karma. If I do the wrong thing, it will come back to haunt me, in my soul.”

Q: Coming back to the present, what are the
connections between your work and spiritual life today?

A: Almost all of my clients are doing something that’s
making the world a better place. Most of them are in creative work. Their politics
and values are similar to mine. Most of them are spiritual. I can bring my
spirituality into the workplace very easily. I don’t have to worry like I did
when I was on Wall Street that I can’t go in and speak my mind and be honest
about how I feel about something.

We talk openly and honestly. When you’re dealing with money,
you have to be honest. I’ll force them to take an active role and pay attention
to their books. And I always set everything up so that if I walk out at
lunchtime and get hit by a bus they can go back in and figure out exactly what
I was doing. There are not going to be any mysteries.

That’s who I am. That’s bringing my spirituality into the
workplace. It’s all one now. I’m one person. I don’t have a work persona and a
non-work persona.

“It’s all one now. I’m one person. I don’t have a
work persona and a non-work persona.”

Q: How long after Al-Anon did other spiritual
activities come in?

A: I began feeling I wanted to start connecting to a
specifically spiritual community. I had been out of the church for 20 years. My
mother came up for Christmas, and said she’d really like to go to Christmas mass.
When we went in, I was just overwhelmed. They were singing Adeste Fidelis in the old Latin. I just started crying. It was such
a good feeling. I wanted to experience this all the time. So I started going back.
And it was great. I heard everything with different ears.

November 30, 2007

SOME YEARS AGO, AT A HIGH SCHOOL REUNION in Richmond,
Indiana, Kristen
Laine found herself in a group of friends from her marching
band days, talking
about what was really going
on in their lives in high school. They shared the back stories they’d kept from each other
of family crises, financial hardships, and other pains. Band, they all agreed,
got them through it.

The evening stayed with Laine, eventually becoming the germ
of an idea for a book: to immerse herself for a year in a high school band and
uncover the stories of a new generation of teenagers. In 2004, she acted on the
dream, moving with her husband and children to Elkhart, Indiana,
home of the reigning state champion high school marching band, the Concord High School
Marching Minutemen.

It was a risky move. Although she had been published in
magazines and had become a an essayist for Vermont Public Radio, Laine had never written
a book. She didn’t have a contract with a publishing house or an agent to shop
the idea.

But the gamble paid off. The resulting book, American Band: Music, Dreams, and Coming of
Age in the Heartland, published this fall by Gotham Books, has made waves
in narrative non-fiction, one of the hot spots of the publishing industry. It
has landed Laine interviews with NPR’s Talk of the Nation and other top radio
programs, and has won praise from major publications as “a touching story
superbly told” (Library Journal) with
“novel-like richness” (The Wall Street
Journal) and “a driving narrative” (The
Chicago Tribune).

The book is layered with unexpected twists. The band’s
hard-driving, clean-cut band
director cares as much about developing leaders as
winning trophies (sample wisdom: “If you work as hard as I want you to, you’re
going to have a great marriage, a great career, and a great life”). The
trumpeter who is the acknowledged leader of the band sees his perfect life come
undone by a series of tragedies in his family, and manages to soldier on. The classic
story of the new kid in town who finds a home in the band – a story Laine,
the daughter of a corporate executive, saw in herself a generation ago – concerns
a Hispanic immigrant. The evangelical Christianity that suffuses much of
heartland America today plays a significant, and sometimes surprising, role in many of the
stories.

I have known Kristen Laine since high school, and for many
years have been impressed by her personal journey. It has taken her through a
series of leaps, from small-town Indiana to
college at Harvard, then to the West Coast, where she worked at Microsoft in
the go-go years of high-tech and, for several years, devoted herself to rock
climbing, before coming to her current life in New England.

I talked with her about American
Band, becoming a writer, and the lessons she’s along the way, from the apprenticeship in risk-taking that she gained from rock climbing to the advice she was given by the poet Gary Snyder.

QUESTION:As much as a story of a high school band, American Band is a book about growing up
and the interior struggles of finding identity and making sense of the world.
Did you go into the book looking for this theme?

KRISTEN LAINE: I went into the book thinking of band as a
transformative, life-changing experience, because it had been that for me. But
I wasn’t sure what I would find. What I found was remarkable and wonderful. Each
of the students I focused
on moved closer to who they needed to become as an
adult.

Q: Many adults find it excruciatingly difficult to talk to teenagers.
How did you get them to open up?

A: I wanted them to feel they could be themselves with me. I
remembered from when I was a teenager that teenagers have many faces. I didn’t
want them to just present the face to me that they present to their teachers. I
didn’t want them to be playing a role. I was sincerely interested in who they
were, what they were thinking about, and why they mad the choices that they
made.

I didn’t talk down to them. I interacted with them in
their own questions. I remembered that when I was a teenager, I was grappling
with big questions. So when
they brought up their questions, like “How does God
interact in the world?” I didn’t act as if I had all the answers and that they
would come to those answers down the road. I engaged them, and asked them questions: What did they think? Why were
they were thinking about this? Who did they talk to about these
questions? I wasn’t trying to look at teenage culture. For me teenage culture is
just the surface. Underneath the surface is where the interesting stuff is.

"I remembered that when I was a teenager, I was grappling
with big questions. So when they brought up their questions, like “How does God
interact in the world?” I didn’t act as if I had all the answers. I engaged them, and asked them questions: What did they think?"

Q: What did you learn about kids and growing up today that
you didn’t appreciate before the book?

A: Before going to Elkhart,
I knew some teenagers, but not many. I think I’d accepted the media image that kids
today are disengaged mall rats and very focused on what college they’re going
to get into or how much money they’re going to make. Although I assumed that band
kids would be a little different from that, I was surprised by how far they
were from those stereotypes.

What I found was a lot of kids who weren’t focused much on college
and money at all. Instead they were focused on their relationship with God.

That was a huge surprise. I grew up in the era of Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell. The Jesus Christ I thought of
was countercultural and antiestablishment. In the 30 years since I’d left the
state, Indiana,
like a lot of the middle of the country, had become more conservative. I’d read
about the change, but didn’t fully appreciate until I got there that I was
going behind the lines of red state America. The culture wars were real.
I’d been on one side of them, and I was now seeing the other side.

"I didn’t fully appreciate until I got there that I was
going behind the lines of red state America. The culture wars were real.
I’d been on one side of them, and I was now seeing the other side."

If I was going to take on these kids’ lives in full, it
meant dealing with their questions about religion and their relationship with
God. They’d been brought up in a culture that had clearly defined things I saw positively
as negative – that feminism was the work of the devil; that homosexuality was
the work of the devil. I was truly the first person some of these kids had
talked to who was a feminist, a Democrat, and a liberal. I had to try to look
at them empathetically. I had to understand that they were trying to make sense
of the world they’d been taught.

Some of the students felt very clear about right and wrong.
But many were trying to
figure things out. Like teenagers everywhere, they had
a view of the adult world that’s from underneath the adults. They saw
hypocrisies between what adults say and do. They read the Bible, and listened
to what their pastors said, but made their own assessments. In doing so they
started to chart a path that was very different from the generation teaching
them. They talked a lot about tolerance. Something they kept saying to me is,
it’s not up to me to say what God decides. It’s up to me to love everybody as
God would want me to love them. Not love the person/hate the sin, but simply
love them.

"Something they kept saying to me is,
it’s not up to me to say what God decides. It’s up to me to love everybody as
God would want me to love them. Not love the person/hate the sin, but simply
love them."

From what I saw, I believe this generation of evangelicals
will remain devout Christians. But I think they’re going to be different in the
political realm, more politically diverse and more interested in social issues
like homelessness. That was one of the encouraging pieces for me. In my
worldview, thinking for yourself is key. I believe that God wants us to find
our own way, and not simply do what we’re told.

Q: Many people think about taking a leap of faith to
pursue a dream. You did it, going to Indiana to research the book, before you had an agent or contract. How did you do it?

A: I think my life has trained me to take risks. Partly it’s
from my family – my three
brothers and I were brought up to think of ourselves
as special. But a lot of it was books. I was a bookish kid. I loved reading,
and read a lot of myths and fairy tales. I often think I’ve gone through my
life thinking of myself in mythological terms, looking at my life as
a series
of quests, with obstacles in my way. I’m always looking for the magical dust or
the implement or sword that’s going to help me get through the obstacle to my
goal. I think I did that when I came to Richmond. Through being in band, I reinvented myself from a girl who was picked on all
the time to someone more poised and socially comfortable. Moving around so much
when I was growing up – we moved every 2-plus years – in a sense, also helped.
It taught me I could make big moves.

"I often think I’ve gone through my
life thinking of myself in mythological terms, looking at my life as
a series
of quests, with obstacles in my way. I’m always looking for the magical dust or
the implement or sword that’s going to help me get through the obstacle to my
goal."

Q: How did rock-climbing come into the picture?

A: It started, ironically, with going to Harvard. I had this
idea that Harvard was a place where people tried to find truth and beauty. When
I got there, I saw that it was more a training ground for people to become
investment bankers, lawyers, or doctors. It was the beginning of the yuppy era.
I didn’t want to join the status quo. After graduation, what I wanted to do was
go to Alaska.
I’d just read John McPhee’s Coming into
the Country.

I couldn’t find a job in Alaska,
so I got one in San Francisco.
Through a friend from Harvard, I met a guy who was a climber. I thought, I’d like
to try that. He got all the gear and ropes and hung them on me – they weigh a
lot, about 30 pounds – and said, “Do you really want to do this?” as in “Why
would you want to do this, you little girl?” That made me mad.

I moved up to Tacoma (Washington) to do
college admissions work for the University of Puget Sound. My travel
area was California. Once, on a trip there, I saw this rock. I got out of my car and, in my
tennis shoes, started climbing up the rock. I got almost to the top, and my leg
started shaking. I got scared and grasped the rock – the wrong move, any
climber will tell you – and fell to the ground, into some bushes. Luckily, I
wasn’t injured.

After I fell, I could have said, "I don’t want to do this."
But instead I said, “I need lessons.” I wanted to do it, so I learned how to do
it. And I liked it. I loved it, in fact. I lived out my dream to be an explorer
and adventurer. For several years, in my 20s, I became a climbing bum. It was
not an easy life. I lived without a car and really close to the bone. But I had
really great adventures.

"After I fell, I could have said, 'I don’t want to do this.'
But instead I said, 'I need lessons.' I wanted to do it, so I learned how to do
it. And I liked it. I loved it, in fact."

Q: What did you like about climbing?

A: Climbing got me outside myself. It requires absolute
focus, something I think I crave. I loved the feel of rocks. I loved the
smells. I loved the people I got to know. I learned a lot from the other
climbers I was around. They were people who were, literally, not taking the
easy way. Many of them had very interesting lives. It was an apprenticeship for
me in risk-taking, not only in going up a rock but in all of life.

Q: What did you learn about risk-taking?

A: Climbers I knew died. It’s one of the sad truths about
climbing. Climbing magazine always
has an obituaries column. So death became part of what I learned about. I
learned that life is short. Even if you live to be 95, there’s not an infinite
length of time. To hold back from what I most want to do is a crime.

Over time, I learned that the climbers who were less likely
to die were the ones who prepared very carefully. They were risk-takers, but
they prepared themselves well. I’ve drawn on that lesson many, many
times.

Then, in the simple, physical act of climbing, I learned
what it means to go for it. There are lots of climbing moves that you can’t do
if you hold back.

"Over time, I learned that the climbers who were less likely
to die were the ones who prepared very carefully. They were risk-takers, but
they prepared themselves well. I've drawn on that lesson many, many times."

Q: Take me through one of those moves.

A: The standard climbing rule is you need three points of
contact with the rock. Three points make you stable. It’s best if it’s your two
feet and one hand. But there are times that you have to make a dynamic move, where
you have only one point of stability, the point you’re pushing off from, to
grab hold of a rock or ledge. To reach a point of safety, you have to go past a
point of no safety. You have to have faith. Many of these moves also take you past
a point of no return. You can’t backtrack and reverse a leap.

When I think about the leap that we took to do the book, we had
to go past a point of no return. We actually went past a couple of them.

"The standard climbing rule is you need three points of
contact with the rock. But there are times where
you have only one point of stability, the point you’re pushing off from. To reach a point of safety, you have to go past a
point of no safety. You have to have faith."

Q: What were the points of no return for you with the book?

A: I knew that I was unlikely to get an agent or a contract
before we went to Indiana.
I was too much of an unknown. The only way we were likely to pull this off was
to take a risk. Once I got to that point it was an easy question. I believed in
the book.

That’s another thing I’ve learned: to trust my instincts. When
I have strong leadings,
they’re usually right. I had a strong sense this was
going to be a good book. There hadn’t been one like it. I had the background to
write it. I felt it was a reasonable risk.

Q: How were you able to take the risk of pulling up stakes and going to Indiana to research the book?

A: I owe a lot to my husband, Jim [Jim Collins, also a
writer, author of The Last Best League,
on the Cape Cod summer baseball league]. There
was no way I could have researched and written this book without the sacrifices
Jim made, moving with me to Indiana and taking care of our children, so that I
could focus on the book. I spent a long time as a single woman asking the men I
dated, would you ever stay home with children? It’s really hard for women in my
generation to find that. And then I met Jim. He wanted to be fully engaged as a
parent, and to have a real partner in his life. Jim knows the excitement of
sharing an intellectual life and career, and wanted that in his marriage.

Q: How did you manage financially?

A: We had come into our marriage with money from my being in
the high tech business. We used most of it for Jim’s book, and figured we would
spend the rest for my book. As it turned out, we needed to spend that money by
the time we came back from Indiana,
before I started writing. We sold off some stock and a life insurance policy.
Then we borrowed money from one of my brothers.

We were right at the point of saying, “If I don’t get an
agent by next week, we’re going to have to find other jobs,” when things
shifted. That was on a Sunday. By Friday, the agent I’d wanted from the
beginning, Robert Shepard, told me wanted to represent the book. That was good
news: Robert wouldn’t have taken the book unless he knew there was a good
chance of being able to sell it. From there, my story went beyond fairy tale. Not
only did I get enough money to write the book, but I got a lot of money for a
first-time author. Jim didn’t have to work, so he could totally take care of
the kids while I finished the book.

Q: It’s striking to me how often coincidence comes up in the interviews I've done for Insight Trails –
when people put themselves out there, things happen.

A: A number of years ago, at a writers conference in Squaw Valley, I went on a hike with the poet Gary Snyder.
On the hike, I asked him, “How do I make a living at writing?” He turned
around, in midstride, while bounding up these rocks – he’s truly like a
mountain goat – and said, “You just do it.” It was a very simple idea. You just
do it.

It took me a long time to get rid of my anxiety about money.
But once I made the leap mentally, people took me more seriously. You recognize
it in someone. I think something actually, physically changes in people, in how
they hold themselves, when they’re committed to a path.

"I think something actually, physically changes in people, in how
they hold themselves, when they’re committed to a path."

Q: What else have you learned about risk-taking?

A: That you have to be fully invested. For a while in my
early 30s, I got so used to taking risks that I would just leap. The last job I
had at Microsoft was entirely the wrong leap. I took it because I thought it
was going to look good. I forgot to ask myself if I really wanted it. It turned
out that I didn’t. I got fired. I failed. Moving up the corporate ladder turned
out not to be meaningful enough to me for me to take that big a risk. I didn’t
want it badly enough to do all it required.

In contrast, writing this book was something I’d wanted my
whole life. I was so determined to do it. It was the first time in work that
I’ve ever had the feeling that I’d had climbing, of absolute investment.

Q: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?

A: I first said I wanted to be a writer when I was five
years old. I had other dreams as well. When I was seven, I wanted to be a
missionary. I wanted to go to China,
and I thought being a missionary was how you got to China. I was reading a lot of 19th-Century
books at the time! I also wanted to be an explorer. I remember reading about
Marco Polo and being unhappy that there were no more continents to be discover
– then reading Kon-Tiki [Thor
Heyerdahl’s book about crossing the Pacific by raft] and thinking, there are other ways to be an explorer. When I
think about the passions I’ve had in my life – words and books, having
adventures, and trying to make the world a better place – nothing has changed!
(Laughs)

"For many years, I think I was waiting to be anointed, like
the girl at the soda fountain who gets tapped to be a movie star. I had this
idea that writers were picked. Now I realize that writing is not a divine
gift. It's a craft. If you want to do it, you get an apprenticeship."

Q: How close is where you’ve wound up to where you thought, back in your 20s,
that you’d be at this stage of life?

A: When I was younger, I think I had a failure of
imagination about what it meant to be a writer. I had an ideal, and that ideal
got in my way. For a number of years, I think, I fell into avoidance
strategies. It was exciting to be at Microsoft, but I knew every day that it
wasn’t really where I wanted to be.

When I was turning 40 one of my brothers said to me, “If you’re
40 and you’re not writing, maybe you weren’t meant to do it.” Inside I just
screamed, “NO!” Because I didn’t want to believe it. But after I got done
screaming, I asked myself, what am I still missing? And I tried to find people
who could help me get the skills I lacked so I could get to where I am today.

For many years, I think I was waiting to be anointed, like
the girl at the soda fountain who gets tapped to be a movie star. I had this
idea that writers were picked. Now I realize that writing is not a divine
gift. It's a craft. If you want to do it, you get an apprenticeship. You go get the skills
you need and practice them.

To learn more about the book, read a sample chapter, listen
to interviews with Kristen on Talk of the
Nation and other programs, or read reviews of the book, please visit the American Band website:http://www.americanbandbook.com/

To listen to some of Kristen Laine’s commentaries on Vermont
Public Radio:

October 12, 2007

THROUGHOUT HISTORY, PEOPLE HAVE BELIEVED that to discover
our true selves, we need to get free of our physical selves. Dr. George Russell
is part of a growing wave of healers
who, drawing on forgotten ancient wisdom
and modern, scientific research, argue that body and
soul are intertwined and
need to be addressed together. Our
bodies are repositories of our experiences. If we want to shed ourselves of
memories that hold us back, we need to work on the mind and also the body, “the heavy
bear who goes with me,” in the poet Delmore Schwartz’s words. Otherwise, the
issues in our tissues – the knot in the back from a long-ago trauma, the stiff
neck from a past job – will continue to nag at us, like a bad dream.

Like Joe Kelly, Insight
Trails’ first interview (see Sept. 10 post), George Russell discovered
his talent in the field he is now working early in life. But, like Kelly, he did not pursue this work until midlife. Russell graduated from Wesleyan University with a major in intellectual
history and dance; earned a masters degree in movement studies from the same
institution; choreographed and danced in modern dance companies in New York; and taught
college-level dance courses.

He went
back to school for his chiropractic degree in his 30s, graduating summa cum
laude from the University of Bridgeport in 2000.

Russell's practice, based in an airy office off Union Square
in New York City, is a hybrid, combining chiropractic, bodywork, and individual
counseling, with a goal of promoting not only physical healing for back
problems, arthritis, carpal tunnel, and physical ailments, but spiritual growth
and a more vibrant overall life. This integrative approach and his enthusiastic,
engaged style make Russell a sought-after teacher and mentor. He is an
instructor at the Swedish Institute in New York City and the Kripalu yoga center in Lennox, Mass., and is a visiting lecturer
at Wesleyan. He is also a guest choreographer and dance master at the De Facto
Dance Company in New York City.

I talked with Russell about how he defines spirituality in his work; his approach to his practice; making a career change in midlife; and how he draws on his varied life experiences in his work.

QUESTION: What have you learned about people’s relationships
with their bodies since you started doing this work?

GEORGE RUSSELL: I think people are unaware of how much consciousness
is physical and embedded in the body. There’s an archeological quality to our bodies. Events are inscribed in
our musculature, our posture, and facial expressions. It’s like the rings of a
tree. Our body reveals our history. A wince can tell you that a person has a
stressful job. Worriers often have a line between their eyes.

"There’s an archeological quality to our bodies. Events are inscribed in
our musculature, our posture, and facial expressions. It’s like the rings of a
tree."

And we experience it ourselves. Deeper truths are often accompanied
by events in the body, like a gut feeling, a sigh, relaxed breathing, an expansion
in the tissue, or sweating, breathing fast, or getting a feeling that
something’s wrong or that someone’s not telling the truth.

I think we know all this intuitively. We all pick up
information from each others’ body language. But our culture teaches us to not
pay attention to this information. The body is presumed to be this
unintelligent part of ourselves. It’s not given relevance.

Yet consciousness, intellect, spirit, are all completely
present in the body.

Q: How do you see your work as spiritual?

A: I always enter therapeutic relationships with the
presumption that the person is always there for a spiritual as well as a
physical reason. The spiritual is being expressed through the body. There’s
always some deeper energetic equivalent to the physical pain.

"I always enter therapeutic relationships with the
presumption that the person is always there for a spiritual as well as a
physical reason."

What I try to do is ferret it out and bring it to
expression. Partly that’s to make people aware – to focus on the physical
sensation inside them. But it’s also to encourage them to engage in behaviors
that will shake unhealthy patterns out of their body, so that new, healthier
patterns can emerge.

The work I do on people’s bodies can result in a person
having a revelation about their body, their relationship to themselves, or their
relationships to other people. It can also offer comfort at a time that it is
deeply needed. All of this, I think, is spiritual work.

Q: Can you give me an example?

A: I had a patient come in with Stage IV cancer. She needed
a positive experience of her body. Her body, from her perspective, had betrayed
her. She was in a lot of pain, and that pain was intolerable. So I put my hands
lightly on her body and moved very slowly. At a certain point, I felt her take
a deep sigh, and her body moved into the table. It was almost as if her body
took my hand. At that moment I knew we could go into a different realm.

"I put my hands
lightly on her body and moved very slowly. At a certain point, I felt her take
a deep sigh, and her body moved into the table. It was almost as if her body
took my hand."

Q: How do you work with patients to get them to that state?

A: Patients often come in scared or tense—sometimes, like this
patient, for good reason. They lie on the table as if they are trying to hold their
body off the table, like a person walking on ice, afraid it’s going to break at
any minute. You can’t tell someone in that state to relax; it will just make
them tenser. So I try to coach them through. Sometimes I’ll start with the
patient face-down. When you are face-up, you’re conscious; your sensory organs
are facing the world. When you’re face-down, you go into your own world. I’ll tell
them to feel the support of the table coming up to them, or let their eyes drop
into their head like Alka-Seltzer into a glass.

When I feel them relax, I’ll say, “I don’t know what you
just did, but something changed in the last 30 seconds. Whatever you’re doing,
keep doing it. You’re doing great.” Often, patients don’t know there’s been a
change. Telling them “bookmarks” the
sensation, like on a computer, so they can
return to it in the future.

Q: How do you know what to do?

A: One of my mentors, Irene Dowd, said that, whenever you’re
touching someone, they’re touching you back. Touch is never subject-object. You
never touch someone and make a change in them without them touching you and
making a change in you. So the first thing, when I touch someone, is to make
that contact consciously, listening
to what they’re communicating to me, and taking in information on many levels: their
words, the symptoms they describe, their body language and posture. Sometimes
the pain is one place, but there’s an anomaly in their body posture somewhere
else that needs to be addressed for the person to heal. Sometimes I just get an
intuitive feeling coming from a patient.

I had a patient who had been coming to see me every week for
years. One day, when he came in and lay on the table, I saw that his hands were
tense. So I started by taking his hands, very consciously, the way you would
take a hand if you were going to shake hands. And then I passed my other hand
over it. I’m not sure why I did it. He immediately burst into tears. For the
entire half-hour he was with me, he was crying. Toward the end of the time, I
said, our session will be over in a few minutes. He grieved more deeply. And
then he came out of it, and he turned to me and said, “You know I wasn’t
expecting that to happen.” He walked out of the office very light.

"For the
entire half-hour he was with me, he was crying.... He turned to me and said, 'You know I wasn’t
expecting that to happen.'"

Q: What’s that kind of experience like for you?

A: I feel totally blessed to be part of an event like that.
It’s deeply fulfilling. To be able to sit with someone while they’re having a
profound experience, and to have the possibility of being a catalyst for that
experience through working on a muscle, or joint, or just listening, is
amazing.

Q: Did you go into this work expecting this kind of
experience?

A: No! When it first started to happen, I was afraid of it. I
would try to stop it, back off, switch speeds, or do something that would
distract the patient from that experience. I didn’t know what it was and I
didn’t know how to deal with it.

In time, I learned to just follow the patient. I had a
client once who would writhe, and form twisting, torturous shapes in her body
while I was working with her. I had no idea what was going on. But instead of
trying to control it – which I really couldn’t anyway – I decided to just
follow her lead, and say, “I’m right here with you,” and keep a hand on her,
and be with her.

Today I come into a session not expecting something like that to
happen, but not expecting it won’t, either. I’m not as surprised by what occurs.

Q: How did you get into this work?

A: I always knew how to do bodywork. I was always aware that
people have emotions while they are being worked on. I knew where to touch
people, and where the next spot was that I was supposed to touch.

Q: Always being…high school?

A: More like age 4 or 5. I would touch my mother’s back, and
could feel something. I became more aware of it when I was in college. We’d
give each other backrubs in my dorm at the end of the day. I became aware that
I was really sensitive to other people’s touch. I discovered that I could do
things that other people couldn’t do. I knew where to touch people but moreover felt their brokenness, where they were sad, tense, or weak, and how it expressed itself
physically. I wanted to be able to correct that or make it better. I also could
sense where people felt strong, and how to amplify that.

"I always knew how to do bodywork.... I knew where to touch people but moreover felt their brokenness, where they were sad, tense, or weak."

When I became a dancer, I would do bodywork on other dancers
– dancers always have some part of their body they need work on. Eventually
people started asking me to work on
them. And they started giving me
money. Literally, that’s how it happened. I was still a dancer. I had no formal
training in bodywork. But people just started asking me to work on them and
paying me for it. They would give me money, and say “I want you to have this."

So I started putting out the word that I was willing to give
people bodywork. But I realized there were areas I didn’t know, couldn’t treat,
and needed to learn about. I wanted to learn the names of things. I wanted to
learn anatomy and kinesiology. I wanted to learn where my boundaries should be.

Q: So what did you do?

A: It didn’t make sense for me to go to massage school. I
knew how to do massage. I thought of becoming an osteopath but I didn’t want to
do surgery or pharmacology. I wasn’t very interested in the traditional medical
model. I believe in science, and I use
it.
But I wanted to operate on many
levels. I was very interested in anatomy and kinesiology. But I didn’t believe
that they’re the predominant mode that heals people. I really think the main
thing that heals people is energetic and spiritual – what’s going on inside.
You have to look at different levels of perception all the time. You can’t rely
on just one.

Q: Was it hard to leave professional dance?

A: Every dancer knows they are going to have two or three
careers. I had reached an end of the line. I was in an unpopular art form,
modern dance, which was not lucrative. I hadn’t achieved all my goals. But I’d
had a good performing career. I had performed my own work. But, as a modern
dancer, I’d never really made any money. I was working a full-time job to
support my career. I’d never saved any money. I didn’t really believe I could
get grants. By the time I was 34 I realized that, more than nurturing my inner
child, I needed to nurture my inner senior citizen.

For a time, I thought about going
into academia and becoming a professor. But my experience of teaching on a
college level was that the college environment was more of a mind-centered
institution. Intellectual faculties were prized over experiences of the body,
and dance was implicitly denigrated because it was viewed as something “not of
the mind.” It wasn’t an environment that I wanted to be in. Plus, I liked the
idea of achieving something practical. In bodywork, I know at the end of the
half hour that something has happened. I can tell whether a person is feeling
better or not. I like that.

Q: Did you have any “oh, no!” moments when you were making
your career change, times when you were convinced “I can’t do this. I don’t belong”?

A: Absolutely. If you had asked me what are the two things I
would never ever do in my life I would say, “Be a scientist and run a small
business.” I had to learn them how you would learn a foreign language. I had no
aptitude for them. God has a sense of humor. In order to do this thing that was
my dream, I had to do things that were completely counter-character-logical and
counter-intuitive.

"God has a sense of humor. In order to do this thing that was
my dream, I had to do things that were completely counter-character-logical and
counter-intuitive."

Q: How did you get through that?

A: I went to friends for support. They reminded me that I
could do what I was doing. Still, it wasn’t easy. My original goal was to go to
medical school. I needed to take organic chemistry, biology, and physics. It was
really hard. But my back was to the wall.

I needed A’s in the classes to get into medical school. And,
in the end, I got B’s, not A’s. And I didn’t like it. I changed my mind and enrolled
in chiropractic school. I was disappointed. But I was pragmatic. I was in my
mid-30s. I didn’t have the time to take another year to retake the classes and
get better grades, and then start medical school. Chiropractic school had
rolling admissions, so I could go right away.

Looking back, I’m glad it worked out the way it did. The
schooling I got to become a chiropractor was much more focused on neurology, anatomy,
and the physical body, which is where my interests were. I wanted to assist
people’s healing with my hands, my heart, and my mind. I think chiropractic school
prepared me much more for the kind of work I wanted to do than medical school
would have. You go to a doctor and they don’t touch you; they send you for
diagnostic imaging. It’s a very different way of gathering information and a very
different model.

Q: Why does that distinction matter?

A: Let’s say you have a herniated disc in your back. A
doctor will go in and do an operation to fuse the vertebrae and take the disc
out. It fixes the problem. But if you don’t change how you move, you’re likely
going to end up back in the same situation, with an adjacent disc herniated.

In order to heal and stay healed, people have to
change their habits. Injury is the intersection of a long-held habit with an
unfortunate event. You can’t just be patched and continue the way you are
going. You have to change. I don’t think people are aware how much their body
is ruled by habit. Often, you have to change on very deep levels. Habits are as
much defined by your psychology and spirituality – how you look at life – as by physical
behaviors. All those things go together.

"In order to heal and stay healed, people have to
change their habits.... Often, you have to change on very deep levels. Habits are as
much defined by your psychology and spirituality – how you look at life – by as physical
behaviors."

Q: How do you not absorb patients’ emotions?

A: Sometimes it’s really hard. I try to not think of their
energy stopping in my body, but going through me, into the ground. But that’s
not always possible. When it does happen – that I take it on – I try to write
about it, or talk about it, or some other conscious process.

Q: What’s your hardest challenge now?

A: One is balancing work with rest. I’ve asked my
receptionist to start writing breaks into the schedule, so I can have down
time, for myself. That’s a big change. Two years ago, I would fill every day
with appointments. My work is time-intensive. I have to be there physically and
emotionally. And I enjoy what I do. So it’s easy to get involved to the extent
that I’m answering an email from a client at 3:30 in the morning.

Q: Is where you’ve wound up where you thought you’d be?

A: Absolutely not. What I do now is not what chiropractors
do, and it’s not what body workers do, and it’s not what movement specialists
do. It’s a hybrid of lots of different things. It’s not something I thought I
would ever get the chance to do. I didn’t know there was a field where you
could do this.

"What I do now is not what chiropractors
do, and it’s not what body workers do, and it’s not what movement specialists
do. It’s a hybrid of lots of different things. It’s not something I thought I
would ever get the chance to do."

I think improvisational dance helped me get here. In dance,
you’re moving across a room with other people in unison and suddenly you feel
it’s not just you moving, it’s a whole bunch of people moving together. The
event stops being a series of individual movements piled together and becomes a
transcendent experience.

I suppose that’s why I’m doing now, improvisational dance –
a series of interactive movements that go on back and forth between me and the
other person, hopefully resulting in a feeling of transcendence and communion,
that invokes a power that’s greater than either of us and feeds us both…and then
they pay me!

October 01, 2007

THANKS TO EVERYONE WHO HAS contacted me about Insight Trails’
interview with
Dads and Daughters (DADs) president and co-founder Joe Kelly, published on Sept. 10 (for more, see "Insight Trails Q&A: Joe Kelly").
It's
great to get
your feedback! The Q&A prompted a number
of questions from readers, so I scheduled a
follow-up interview with Joe. Here are
the
results.

Reader Question 1: “Would Joe be willing to talk more about
the effect of his alcoholism on his work? [Joe has been in recovery for 27 years.] How did he get from there to the
point where he was able to move forward with his life?”

Joe Kelly: When I was still drinking, my work life was
sporadic. It was rare for me to keep a job for more than six months. I dropped
out or flunked out of college five times. The notion that work would be a
source of ongoing fulfillment and challenge was really not on my radar screen.
I didn’t care about anything as much as I cared about drinking.

I always worked. I worked my way through high school. After
I left college, I worked a number of jobs. I worked in a clothing factory. I
drove a meat delivery truck. I worked in a juvenile home. I worked in traveling
repertory theater in Nebraska,
driving the truck, setting up and striking sets, doing bit parts as an actor. I
worked at a Catholic retreat house. But none of them lasted long.

"There was a lot of laughter
at [AA] meetings. It mystified me – what was up with these people? – and kept me
coming back."

I eventually got a job as a staff person in a battered women’s
shelter in Omaha.
God only knows how. Literally. I was very lucky. The shelter focused a lot on
looking at family systems and underlying issues like alcoholism. I became aware
of the alcoholism in my family tree. My supervisor, who herself was a recovering
alcoholic, nudged me to get an alcohol assessment.

When I was told I had a drinking problem, I panicked. I was
24½ years old. Nancy and I had just gotten married. We were pregnant. I was
terrified. I was also miserable. My tolerance had evaporated. Drinking was
making me anxious instead of giving me relief. What I was doing wasn’t working.

I went to see the priest who’d married us, and I just
spewed. “Oh, my God, I’m an alcoholic!” He listened patiently, and at the end, he
looked at me calmly and said, “Well, what are you going to do?” I said, “I
don’t know.” He said, “Is there anyone you can talk to?” The next day, I talked
with my supervisor. She took me to my first AA meeting. The meeting became my
home group.

It was quickly apparent the people in AA knew what I was going
through. Plus they were having a really good time. There was a lot of laughter
at meetings. It mystified me – what was up with these people? – and kept me
coming back. I started doing what they told me to do, and it worked. It wasn’t
easy. But my life started becoming more manageable. Life started making a lot
more sense.

I kept the job at the battered women’s shelter. The children
were born in August. Then when, they were 9 months old, we moved to Minneapolis and Nancy
opened the gallery. I worked almost three years at Roto-Rooter (see main
story, Sept. 10).

"Being an alcoholic or addict, you lose contact with who you
are. Sobriety doesn’t bring it back with a snap of the finger. It takes time."

Being an alcoholic or addict, you lose contact with who you
are. Sobriety doesn’t bring it back with a snap of the finger. It takes time. After
I’d been sober for four years or so, I started thinking about what I really
wanted to do. What kinds of things did I like? I remembered that when I was
growing up in New Jersey, I loved listening to
WOR radio from New York City, news and interviews all day long. And I loved listening to baseball games on
the radio. Brown Institute, a technical school for radio broadcasting, was nearby in Minneapolis.

I wanted to go right away but couldn’t. My lack
of patience was emblematic of my continuing immaturity. We had to rejigger our
schedules, and I had to get financial aid lined up. It took about four months,
but I finally got in. I found that journalism really suited my personality.
Interestingly, several years ago, going through my mother’s things, I found a
project I’d done from first grade. I’d glued the mastheads of The New York Times, The Herald Tribune, The
Star Ledger, The Journal American – the newspapers I grew up with – on
construction paper. Inside I’d written, “What I want to be when I grow up: I
want to be a reporter.” I have no memory of having created it. I didn’t go into
journalism until I was 30.

Reader question 2: "I'm interested in learning more about how Joe and his wife juggle the demands of family and creative life."

Joe Kelly: Ours was an unusual family. When the kids were 11, and we started New Moon, we included them in it. Because the girls were unschooling, they were fully involved. They were part of the creative process. As a result, we were able to live our lives together as a unit and share things in a lot of ways.

There were issues of balancing work and family, but, because New Moon was headquartered in our house, they weren't the same as some other families. There were some evenings, for instance, when the kids would be standing at the foot of the stairs shouting up to us in the attic, where Nancy and I would be finishing up something on the magazine, "Come down here and eat dinner!"

"Saying 'It's your turn,' has been less about keeping score and more
about encouraging the person to take risks, and expressing support for that risk-taking. It's saying, 'You do have the freedom to try this, and I'm willing to sacrifice for this cause.'"

Nancy and I have seldom kept score over whose turn it was to earn money. For nearly all our time together, we've both been working and earning money.

When it comes to the big things, we've said "it's your turn" to one another: me going to radio school after we'd moved to Minnesota for Nancy to start the gallery; Nancy starting New Moon after we'd moved the family twice for my radio jobs; me helping start DADs after she'd started New Moon.

I think, though, that saying "It's your turn," has been less about keeping score and more about encouraging the person to take risks, and expressing support for that risk-taking. It's saying, "You do have the freedom to try this, and I'm willing to sacrifice for this cause."

September 10, 2007

I FIRST MET JOE KELLY A DECADE AGO, WHEN he came to New York City for the
kickoff meeting of New Moon books.
With
him was a gaggle of 10- to 14-year-old girls
who had flown in from across the
country to be the editorial board for the books. Not a junior or advisory board
but the board,
responsible for deciding
the content, writing the books, and coaching each other through writer’s block
and the other obstacles that writers go through. Joe was there to encourage and
support.

It was a formula that Joe and his wife, Nancy Gruver, had
honed to great success with New Moon
magazine, the bimonthly publication by, for, and about girls that the couple founded in
1993. The publication, which Nancy continues to run, has won shelves full of awards and been a springboard for a
generation of girls to follow their dreams.

For the past eight years, Joe has advocated for girls on a
larger stage, as co-founder and president of Dads and Daughters (DADs), a
non-profit group dedicated to advocating for the importance of fathers in
daughters’ lives. He has written six books, including Dads and Daughters: How to Inspire, Understand, and Support Your
Daughter (Broadway/Random House, 2002) and The Dads and Daughters Togetherness Guide: 54 Fun Activities to Help
Build a Great Relationship (Broadway/Random House, 2007).

He has testified before Congress, been featured in The New York Times, People, and The Today Show, andtalked to hundreds of groups, from professional associations to local
parents groups, on issues from fathering, to Title IX, eating
disorders, and marketing to kids.
The Women’s Sports Foundation and iParenting.com
have named him “father of the year.”

I talked with Joe, an easy-to-smile 52 year old, about his
career path, the cues he has taken from his wife and twin daughters, and his
belief in the power of transformation, which he has experienced personally as a
recovering alcoholic with 27 years of sobriety.

Question: If you could go back to when you were 25 years old
and offer yourself a piece of advice, what would it be?

Answer: Be in your own life. Look for inspiration in your
own life. The things Nancy and I have done that look remarkable to the outside world all sprang out of our
own personal lives, loves, and concerns.

Insight: Look to your own life for inspiration. "The things Nancy and I have done that look remarkable to the outside world all sprang out of our
own personal lives, loves, and concerns."

Q: Would the Joe Kelly of 25-30 years ago be surprised at
where you are today?

A: Very surprised. If someone had said to me in my first
year of sobriety,
“Sit down and make a list of all the things you dream of
doing with your life,” that list would be so pathetic compared to what has
actually happened. My imagination, my sense of what’s possible, and my sense of
my own capabilities were all so stunted.

Q: What would have been on your list?

A: Hold a steady job. Provide for my family. Be a marginal
husband. That would have been about it. If someone had really pushed me and
asked, “What is the most wild and outrageous thing you could do?”
what probably
would have come up is a dream I had when I was nine or ten years old to write a
book. I would have had no idea what it would have been about, though.

Q: What happened to shift things in your life?

A: Sobriety, and by sobriety I don’t mean just not drinking,
but continuous engagement in growing
spiritually, emotionally, psychologically,
socially. That and having children, and having female children,
and two at
once!

A lot of the shifts in my life, though, can be traced to stupidity
(laughs) – being young and naïve and stupid enough to take risks.

Insight: Be open to taking risks. "A lot of the shifts in my life can be traced to...being young and naïve and stupid enough to take risks."

Q: What do you mean?

A: In 1981, we moved from Omaha, Nebraska,
to the Twin Cities, so that Nancy and a woman she had been working with could
open a contemporary American crafts gallery. It was, on the surface, an
incredibly stupid thing to do. We had nine-month-old twins. In four years, the
business never paid Nancy
a dime. We kept moving from apartment to apartment because we couldn’t afford
the rent. I got a job dispatching trucks for Roto Rooter for our steady income.

About four years later, after the gallery had closed, I
decided to enroll in a radio and TV broadcasting program at a for-profit tech
school in the Twin Cities. I thought I could get a job doing play-by-play for a
Major League Baseball team (another bit of naivete!). I got a job at a
hole-in-the-wall breakfast diner, and worked a couple of hours in the morning
before school. On the weekend, I delivered newspapers.

In the course of the program, though, I landed an internship
at a radio newsroom. I
learned how to call people up, interview them, and write
copy, and found I was good at it. While I was still in school, I got hired to
be the news director for a radio station in Marshall, a small farming town in
southwestern Minnesota.

So we packed up and moved again. We didn’t know anybody
there. We knew nothingabout farming.
We’d both grown up in the suburbs. It was 1985. Agriculture was in the midst of
a massive catastrophe, and my job was to report on it.

But I learned on the job. I got to be good at it. It was a
big adventure. My stories got picked up.
I won awards. I ended up being
president of the Minnesota Advisory Board for United Press International.

Out of that experience, I was hired by Minnesota Public
Radio to work in Duluth.
Once again, we knew nobody there. We just packed up and went. Nancy got a really good job with a multi-county government agency, starting a pilot
program to provide health insurance for the working poor – which she got, in
part, because of the job she had found in Marshall
being business manager of a hospice.

In retrospect, we took a lot of stupid leaps not fully
realizing how stupid they were. But they worked out. It was the same thing with
the magazine. We were too dumb to know it was dumb to do.

Q: How so?

A: We had no experience in magazines. I had experience in
journalism, but it was in radio, not print. Serendipitously, the style of
writing for radio and the style of writing for children are very similar.
Writing for radio is all in active voice. It’s all short sentences, one thought
per sentence. And that’s how you write for children. I didn’t know this at the
time, but it worked out perfectly.

Insight: Be open to serendipity. "The style of
writing for radio and the style of writing for children are very similar. I didn’t know this at the
time, but it worked out perfectly."

The idea for the magazine occurred to Nancy literally out of the blue. We had been
working in our jobs for about five years, and were getting bored. I started
working part-time to spend more time with our kids. Nancy applied for a fellowship to the Kennedy School in Boston to learn more about public health
policy. She was a finalist. But she didn’t get it, and she was crushed.

It became a crisis moment for her: “What do I really want to
do?” She knew she’d be passionate about working on girls’ or women’s issues,
but had no idea what or how to get there. So the two of us went off for a
weekend to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to figure out what we were going to
do with our lives. Of course, when we got there, we never talked about it. We
read books the whole weekend.

Finally, on the way home, driving through the Upper
Peninsula – this beautiful, desolate landscape – Nancy turned to me and said, “How about a
Junior Ms.?” I said, “What?” And she
said, “How about a magazine for girls that girls would run?” She says now that
the idea just snapped into her head, fully
formed. She knew she was going to do
it. It was going to happen.

When we got home, we sat down and talked with the girls, who
were 11 at the time (they are now in their late 20s). Their response was,
“You’re crazy. You don’t know anything about magazines.” And Nancy said, “Well, OK. We know that. But
let’s say we could figure out that part. Would you be interested?” And we all
stayed up until 1 o’clock in the morning talking about what it would look like.

Literally nine months later, the first issue came out.

Q: This was Nancy’s
idea. Why did you get involved?

A: We had talked for some time about wanting to work
together. We thought it would be fun to do. Nancy had done a lot of interesting work.
She’d owned her own business, and, through the agency work, had made an impact
in our community. She’s creative. I’m good at envisioning the next step, and
how to get there. And I had experience in journalism. We were both concerned
about the girls, and sexism, and the world the girls were growing up in. We
didn’t know what the idea was going to become. We just thought it was a good
idea, and the girls and their friends and the mothers of their friends thought
it was a good idea.

As I look back on my work life, in nearly all of the cases,
the jobs I’ve taken and careers I’ve had have been presented to me. They came along and I was ready. I’ve sometimes
longed to be the kind of person who plans ahead and plots things out, and
decides with certainty that this is
the work they want to do for the rest of their life. But that’s not how my life
has worked. Experience has shown me that good things will come along in life,
and I have faith they will.

Insight: Have faith. "Experience has shown me that good things will come along in life."

Q: When did you start pulling back from your jobs?

A: I quit my job first, before the first issue came out. I had
written a press release on New Moon and
sent it out to a bunch of newspapers. A reporter from the Duluth newspaper followed up and did a feature
story on the magazine and its process. The story got picked up by
Knight-Ridder’s news service and ran in newspapers across the country. Our
phone started ringing off the hook. We had hundreds of people subscribing
before we’d even printed the first issue.

So I left my job and started answering the phone and
entering subscriptions. Nancy kept working awhile longer because she was making more money. We refinanced our house and
took out $10,000. Things mostly fell into place.

Q: Was there an a-ha moment, when you realized “we can do
this”?

A: Not exactly. We did things instinctively. We were
presumptuous. We had faith. Looking back, a lot of things converged to help us.
And not just the successes. Nancy starting the craft gallery, and having it fail, was an important learning
experience. It gave her
concrete experience in how to manage a business. It also taught her the most
important lesson for entrepreneurs: you have to be able to pay yourself. You
can have a great idea, but it’s not good enough if it can’t support you.

The way we ran the magazine, with the adults creating a
space for the kids to exercise their own powers, was something we learned from
unschooling our children. That also was risky – in unschooling, kids set their
own path – but it worked.

Q: Was there fear?

A: Mostly fear about money. We still are fearful about
scarcity. We have always been frugal. Since the first loan, New Moon has never taken out a loan. It's cash-flowed everything it’s done. We didn’t want to be beholden to anyone.

Q: What was it like to work with your wife?

A: It was a lot of fun. But it could also be a source of
tension. We had to work really hard at separating our work life and our home
life. That meant not investing a work disagreement with the baggage of our home life. We had to learn that, when we disagree about a color to use in
the magazine, there’s a fairly decent possibility we’re just disagreeing about
the color. It’s not just one more example that Nancy thinks I’m a blithering idiot. She may really
think green is better.

It still happens when we work together, but I think we’re
better at surfacing the tension more quickly. One of us will recognize right
away, “This is about something else,” and pierce it, or back off, until we can
sit down and talk about what’s really bothering us.

Q: How have you applied the lessons you’ve learned in your
current job with Dads & Daughters?

A: A lot of what underlies my work is questioning the way
things are. It’s the journalistic instinct. I think it’s especially true for
people who have gone through life-or-death transformations like getting sober.
You realize it’s possible for things to be radically changed.

Insight: Change is possible. "[When you've been] through a life-or-death transformation, you realize it's possible for things to be radically changed."

A: There are a lot of ads out there that celebrate qualities
you don’t want to see in kids. What we’ve tried to do is track down the head of
the companies – many of whom are men and fathers – and ask them to re-imagine
the ads’ messages as something they would say to their daughters. It’s making
the personal political.

If you put it in this context, an ad that says, “4 out of 5
girls you hate ask for it by name. Stop hating them. Starting being them” – a
real ad, by the way, for a hair product – is absurd. You wouldn’t teach your
daughter to hate other people, or to become like the people they hate.

In that case, the company’s first response, from the
marketing director, was to ignore us. But then we got a personal letter from
the CEO. He said he’d been on vacation with his children when our letter
arrived. He went on to say that when he got back, he called together his team
and told them pull the ads and “never to do anything like that again.”

A lot of times, when we send letters to companies, we get no
response. But almost all the time, when we can engage companies in conversation,
they do what we ask.

Insight: Connect. "What I enjoy most is helping people understand how important
the father-daughter relationship is, and inspiring them to do something about it."

Q: You also focus energy on education.

A: In a sense, my role is to be the “spokesdad.” The core of
that is working to raise the profile of father-daughter relationships, to
inspire fathers and stepfathers to get more involved in their daughters’ lives,
and to give them tools to be better fathers. Fathers and stepfathers have an
incredible influence in their daughters’ lives. Too many don’t realize it, and
the culture doesn’t acknowledge it.

What I enjoy most is helping people understand how important
the father-daughter relationship is, and inspiring them to do something about it. Sometimes
that just means creating a space for dads to think and talk. When I go out to a
school and speak about fathering to a room of 200 fathers, the thing that
happens that makes a real difference is when those 200 guys sitting in the room
look around and say, “There’s 199 other guys here who feel this is important.
I’m not alone.” It’s an inspiring experience.
It certainly inspires me.

That's "It"

****

Resources for going further:

For more on Dads & Daughters, including tips for fathering
daughters and ways to get involved, see www.dadsanddaughters.org .

To learn more about Joe's new book The Dads and Daughters Togetherness Guide: 54 Fun Activities to Help
Build a Great Relationship, and buy a copy, go to www.amazon.com.

To learn more about his book Dads and Daughters: How to Inspire, Understand, and Support Your
Daughter When She's Growing Up So Fast, go to www.amazon.com .

For more about New
Moon magazine, or start a subscription, go to www.newmoon.org .

For more on unschooling, see The Teenage Liberation Handbook, by Grace Llewellyn, at www.amazon.com , or John C.
Holt’s web site, or visit the web site www.unschooling.com .